Discussion
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?
hey mastodon can you do me a favor and not turn this thread about how pervasive LLMs aren’t great for me learning a language and trying to function in that language in real life into a fucking exhausting discussion about how you’d never “use LLMs in prod” but you’ve never noticed a problem with how you’ve used them
like, you realize that software engineering is tangential to this, right? you realize you’re illustrating the problem I’m pointing out by saying these things… right?
what in the fuck even is prod in this context? I’m trying to become bilingual with my human brain. are the language learning apps prod? cause all of you are going on from this prod shit to argue that you’d use LLMs in the exact context that makes learning harder
what I want is a good bilingual dictionary and what I’m getting is fucking slop from people who think bilingual dictionaries are dead
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 even with the hallucination issues, i'm willing to give LLM translation systems the glowing recommendation of "they're a bit better than the shit we had before". Which is more praise than I am gonna give LLMs in any other area they are used in.
Still completely unacceptable to use any kind of machine translation for anything customer-facing, ofc.
guess this take was so red-hot @zzt had to block me for it
on top of retooting the "hilarious" "joke" where someone just insulted me because my opinion differs slightly from theirs
this is how we're gonna defeat AI, right?
@ratsnakegames you seem exhausting
@ratsnakegames @zzt That's simply incorrect. The transformer systems before them - the transformer was invented by Google Translate - were better. Google Translate has now started using the LLM and introducing the lying chatbot factor. It was not better before at all.
@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
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