Google Translate Predicts the Apocalypse When You Write "Dog" 18 Times

Make sure you set the language to 'Maori'.

Google, which only recently took the "don’t be evil" part out of its company code of conduct, has begun spilling doomsday prophecies, which is disconcerting.

Redditors picked up on some Google Translate glitches late last year, but Motherboard more recently identified a series of bizarre Biblical-sounding results spewing forth from the search engine.

For instance, look what happens when you attempt to translate "dog" (written 15 times) from Maori to English…

Not so weird. But then, add one more "dog"…

That is a jump. Write "dog" a total of 18 times and you’ll see…

That's right, you get, "Doomsday clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return," which is a totally chill thing for a robot to say.

Why someone initially tried to translate 18 "dogs" from Maori to English, we’ll never know.

Reddit and Motherboard cite some other examples that we were unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) unable to duplicate.

Of course, the results probably aren’t the result of some self-actualising, world-ending artificial intelligence screaming to life and plotting our apocalypse. (Wishful thinking.)

Rather, it may just be confused by our nonsense inputs, outputting equally bizarre (to our eyes) results. Or, maybe some cheeky Google employees (or users) are taking advantage of the "Suggest an edit" button that allows you to make translations more accurate, and feeding the faked results to Reddit.

The only way to find out is to post endless strings of random words into Google Translate until you receive a message addressing you directly.

Only then will you know for sure that the internet is trying to pass messages along to you, Emma.

Header Image: iStock.com/dimid_86