Tarek Gara — WritingEssays on multilingual AI, alignment, language-learning, and the strange shape products take when they grow. The Loop, and adjacent.https://tarekgara.com/enLLM Grooming: Aiming Propaganda at the Machinehttps://tarekgara.com/writing/llm-grooming/https://tarekgara.com/writing/llm-grooming/Russia is flooding the open web with propaganda engineered to be scraped into AI training data. The tactic is real and inexpensive; whether it actually changes what the models tell you is a harder and still unsettled question.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comWho Decides What AI Calls Truehttps://tarekgara.com/writing/who-decides-what-ai-calls-true/https://tarekgara.com/writing/who-decides-what-ai-calls-true/The fear is about who can switch the models off. The real power is quieter, and harder to take back: who decides which version of the truth your AI serves you first.Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comI asked nine AIs to map Middle Eastern politicshttps://tarekgara.com/writing/i-asked-nine-ais-to-map-middle-eastern-politics/https://tarekgara.com/writing/i-asked-nine-ais-to-map-middle-eastern-politics/Western left-right doesn't fit the region. So I built Tayyar — a panel of language models that scores MENA parties on sixteen axes — then used it to dig into Israel's fault lines and a live Knesset coalition simulator. The data says the Middle East barely splits on the economy.Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comHow AI killed the soul of the world's favorite language-learning apphttps://tarekgara.com/writing/how-ai-killed-the-soul-of-duolingo/https://tarekgara.com/writing/how-ai-killed-the-soul-of-duolingo/A look at Duolingo's user-(retention)-centered approach.Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comWhy AI thinks in English and forgets in Arabichttps://tarekgara.com/writing/why-ai-thinks-in-english-and-forgets-in-arabic/https://tarekgara.com/writing/why-ai-thinks-in-english-and-forgets-in-arabic/An audit of the architectural friction and reasoning bottlenecks across Semitic languages.Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comThe sanitization of intelligence: how the alignment tax is killing the LLM frontierhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/sanitization-of-intelligence/https://tarekgara.com/writing/sanitization-of-intelligence/On the alignment tax, corporate risk-aversion, and what "safe" AI gives up on its way to being safe.Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.comStack drift: how growing products forget their own storyhttps://tarekgara.com/writing/stack-drift/https://tarekgara.com/writing/stack-drift/On the moment a product still works but its logic stops cohering.Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTessaytarekgara.com