Specific Linguistic Questions that Artificial Intelligence (AI) Cannot Answer Accurately: Implications for Digital Didactics

This study aimed to examine the kinds of specific linguistic questions that AI systems cannot answer accurately, drawing on daily scholarly interactions with Copilot (MC), DeepSeek (DS), Google Translate (GT), Gemini, Monica, rather than artificial test prompts. It also seeks to understand why AI makes mistakes and whether the nature of user questions influences AI performance. In addition, it aims to analyze the nature of these failures through a linguistic and a pedagogical lens to offer recommendations for students and researchers on how to critically evaluate AI output in language and translation tasks. For those purposes, a sample of 50 specific linguistic and translation questions that the author asked to MC, DS, GT, Gemini & Monica between 2023 and late 2025 was collected and anlayzed. The questions were classified into the following categories: phonology, transcription, morphology, lexical questions, pragmatics and culture, explanation or translation of Arabic grammatical terms, books AI cannot fully identify, telling a story in Arabic classical literature, converting a hand-written text to a typed text, translation of technical terms, metaphorical expressions and meton