Comment by klntsky
2 years ago
Everyone is excited about LLM abilities to help with language learning, while completely ignoring the fact that for most people LLMs will make the learning unneeded. There will be less experts in the field, and therefore we will lose the part of language and foreign literature understanding not captured by statmodels. Which is a huge part (subtle contexts in poetry, etc)
You aren't wrong, but this has been a dilemma with every new technology. The camera had that effect, modern metalworking had that effect, even tractors had that effect.
It's definitely a problem we should be talking about, but we can't go back in time or remain frozen, the genie never goes back in the bottle. We have to move forward towards the future while salvaging the parts of the past we want to bring with us.
We need efficiency when we want to maximize comfort and minimize labor.
But nothing forbids people to pursue less efficient endeavors during their free time. There are people maintaining old cars and locomotive. There are people gardening or woodworking "inefficiently" for their own pleasure.
What we remove is the need to force people to work on these fields. Whether we abandon them altogether depends solely on our culture.
> But nothing forbids people to pursue less efficient endeavors during their free time.
Assuming they have free time.
This line of thought goes back to Socrates and his supposed views on writing. (That it weakens the memory)
The major difference is that in the event that there's a catastrophic event, we won't be able to build the tech we need because the intermediate steps will be lost.
It is also how we know there hasn't been a civilization more advanced than us that left without a trace. All the oil that was easy to extract has been extracted.
5 replies →
As someone who loves writing in 3 languages (French and German being my native languages, English the third), playing with Claude (and to a lesser degree gpt4) has actually made me play and investigate the nuances of languages so much more. It does a great job of course doing stylistic transformations, which on their own are always stilted, but are great inspiration. But it also does a phenomenal job at explaining the nuances between the language, say when I want to explain why a certain German phrasing “feels” different to me.
Certainly seeing the amount of people never learning the language of the country they emigrated to, this is a problem we already have (and in my situation, never going to country where I don’t speak the language).
I think humans are going to continue nerding with language just as much as they ever have, I do really think it’s an innate drive, and llms are a mind blowing tool to do just so.
> Which is a huge part (subtle contexts in poetry, etc)
Certainly, but from what I remember of my GCSE English Literature back at the turn of the millennium, my fellow students and I didn't understand most of that subtly even when it was famous poets in our native language.
Shakespeare may be unsurprising in this regard given the age (why eye of newt and leg of toad? Some say common names of herbs, others that it's just some amusingly vulgar items), but we were also just as oblivious to the lived experience of being gassed in the trenches as per Dulce et Decorum Est or a cavalry charge as per The Charge of the Light Brigade in English as we would have been if this had been a second language.
I'm not sure about "unneeded". Important motivations why people learn a foreign language are because they want to speak with native speakers in that language without an intermediate (because they move to that country, or because they have a partner speaking that language), or because they find that language interesting/beautiful, or because they want to read or listen to original sources. Machine translation doesn't remove any of those motivations.
> while completely ignoring the fact that for most people LLMs will make the learning unneeded
Good luck using an LLM to talk to strangers in a bar in a foreign language.
This is literally the functionality from the recent OpenAI demo
Yeah, I remember a similar demo, 8 years ago for Skype:
https://youtu.be/G87pHe6mP0I?si=s-BjpVGApB15ciSl
I'm curious to see the next demo, 8 years from now.
10 replies →
A cool aspect here is that the LLM can take over the conversation if you don't know what to say/are bad at smalltalk.
most Latin text have been translated once and more then 100 years ago while most ancient Arabic text have never been translated. this is an old problem.
I see AI as savior here esp with reconstructing old languages we only have small amount of text saved
Which oldest Arabic text do you mean?
Most ancient texts (i.e. Egyptian papyri) are expected to be of too little use to even scan, let alone translate.