I’m glad people are finally noticing LLM translators will just make plausible sentences the fuck up when they’re fed anything but a perfect source to translate, which makes them exhausting and damaging for language learning and a variety of other situations where you’re expected to actually, you know, use the fucking language for anything but a highly inaccurate skim

thank fuck all the language learning companies didn’t jump onto the LLM train, right?

…right?

this post brought to you by the language learning app I’m using semi-consistently telling me that names, formatting artifacts, and words in languages other than the one being learned, all have fabricated definitions related to the sentence they appear next to

this is a very hard error to catch if you aren’t paying attention and it’s actively slowing me down

“LLMs might be horrible at almost everything but at least they’re good at translating and accessibility”

are they though? or are they fucking terrible and you didn’t notice because the output looked good and you didn’t check it?

@zzt A week or two ago I had one of those funny coincidence moments where I saw a post like "It's sad that AI companies are doing this because machine translation is one of the only things LLMs are good for," followed about an hour later by "I had to retranslate this entire passage because the machine translation was nonsense."

It's almost like LLMs aren't good at anything

@awmwrites @zzt Come now, let's be reasonable. They're good at generating intelligible strings of text in many different languages. Otherwise, we wouldn't be in this situation.