[object Object]May 27

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?

Show thread[object Object]May 27

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

Show thread[object Object]May 27

“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?

Show threadSteveMay 27
@zzt I translated something to English yesterday, and the translator made up an “English” word
Show threadfuzzyfuzzyfungusMay 27

@scm @zzt That's...technically...in line with how english-speaking humans handle english.

If we aren't under pressure to be 'generative' we often just yoink the other language's word and call it good.

I suspect that the bot is not driven by a commitment to idiomatic perfection, however.

Show threadSteve
@fuzzyfuzzyfungus @zzt it wasn’t a word in any language, as far as I know, I think it was a mangled English word
May 27 at 3:49pmWeb