Two Emojis of Difference: What Multilingual Affective Generation Benchmarks Actually Measure

Abstract

We audit a multilingual affective generation benchmark eight instruction-tuned LLMs producing emoji summaries for 17,100 Bangla, English and Hindi sentences, with 6,960 human judgements and find its headline conclusions to be artefacts of the measurement instrument rather than properties of the systems. Treating annotators as a random rather than a fixed factor, no system differs significantly from any other ($F(7,14)=0.59$, $p=0.76$), although the conventional analysis declares 19 of 28 pairwise differences significant. Annotator identity explains far more rating variance than system identity, and the winning system changes whenever any single annotator is removed. The ordering that does emerge tracks output length: mean emoji count explains 78.7\% of between-system variance, and a within-item length-matched comparison over 2,599 pairs reverses the leaderboard. We further show that cross-provider anisotropy differences vanish under mean-centring, that per-language token costs change sign with the normalising unit, and that multi-view row-wise splits inflate macro-F1 by $3.1$ points and change the top-ranked system. In place of preference scoring we propose **emoji-affect decodability**, a reference-based probe whose rankings are stable to $\pm0.003$ macro-F1 across seeds.