Quick answer responds in Indonesian, despite results being English

zq40000

For the query "apa 7 cite private reports from consultants?", quick answer returned a response in an unrelated language. As far as I could tell, all the search results were in English, as were the sources quick answer cited.

Pasting the response into Kagi translate, it appears to be Indonesian, and the translation does answer the question relatively well.

My best guess is that one of the results included prompt injection of some kind instructing the LLM to respond in Indonesian, but I cannot confirm this.

It should answer in English

nromdotcom

My best guess is that one of the results included prompt injection of some kind instructing the LLM to respond in Indonesian, but I cannot confirm this.

My guess is that it sees "apa" as the first word of your question. You, of course, intended to reference the APA Style Guide 7th edition, but the model may have read it as "apa," the Indonesian word for "what."

You can see I can reproduce this with the precise wording and casing of your question, but when I put the "APA" initialism in all caps, it returns in English.

So perhaps some tweaking to be done in language detection to avoid collisions like this.