4 ms·

With the current state of AI text generation, isn't this a recipe for disaster? By talking to a chatbot while learning a language you are liable to pick up what

With the current state of AI text generation, isn't this a recipe for disaster? By talking to a chatbot while learning a language you are liable to pick up whatever (vast) errors and mistakes the bot makes.

Hadjimina 4y ago
That's a good point. However, I think we have reached a point where AI text generation has come pretty far and will only continue to get better. Even if you pick up one or two mistakes the A.I. makes but are otherwise fluent, isn't that already an improvement? (Not a rhetorical question, genuinely interested)
- yorwba 4y ago
  There's also the issue of the AI picking up your mistakes and adding more of its own to match the input. When AI Dungeon came out, I recommended it to a friend as a way to practice English, but when she showed me a playthrough, it turned out that the AI had adapted to her writing style full of misspellings and grammar errors, so it probably didn't help at all. (I haven't been able to test your chatbot yet to see whether it suffers from the same problem.) In general, practicing something allows you to do it with less and less effort until you barely have to think about it at all, but if you're practicing making mistakes , that just means you'll be making mistakes without thinking about it. To get better, you also need to notice your mistakes to change what you're doing accordingly. So I think a bot that can guess what you were trying to say and can tell you what you should've said instead might be a bit more useful.
bsaul 4y ago
IMHO, better practice with mistakes, then fix them later once you talk to native speakers, than not practice at all. For kickstarting a language practice, this site honestly seems ideal..
- andrepd 4y ago
  Eh, I tested it with a language I speak and it was almost comically bad. Grammar constructions nobody would use, mixing vocabulary from two different variants in the same sentence, etc.
nmfisher 4y ago
I don't want to say "recipe for disaster", but as someone working on a similar app, it's definitely a challenge. It's one of the reasons I stayed away from a pure ML/language modelling approach. It's really easy for models to get things wrong - for example, elsewhere in this thread there's a Chinese sentence about arranging furniture but the word "arrange" isn't really right (it's more "arrange" in the sense of "arranging a delivery", rather than "arranging a number of objects", and sounds like it's been auto-translated from English). When I started I wanted to be sure that every single word/sentence was "correct" (i.e. a native speaker agreed that all the words/grammar were correct/natural in that context). LMs have improved since I started, but for me, that requirement still stands and ML approaches still need a heavy human touch IMO.

Hadjimina 4y ago

That's a good point. However, I think we have reached a point where AI text generation has come pretty far and will only continue to get better. Even if you pick up one or two mistakes the A.I. makes but are otherwise fluent, isn't that already an improvement? (Not a rhetorical question, genuinely interested)

yorwba 4y ago
There's also the issue of the AI picking up your mistakes and adding more of its own to match the input. When AI Dungeon came out, I recommended it to a friend as a way to practice English, but when she showed me a playthrough, it turned out that the AI had adapted to her writing style full of misspellings and grammar errors, so it probably didn't help at all. (I haven't been able to test your chatbot yet to see whether it suffers from the same problem.) In general, practicing something allows you to do it with less and less effort until you barely have to think about it at all, but if you're practicing making mistakes , that just means you'll be making mistakes without thinking about it. To get better, you also need to notice your mistakes to change what you're doing accordingly. So I think a bot that can guess what you were trying to say and can tell you what you should've said instead might be a bit more useful.

bsaul 4y ago

IMHO, better practice with mistakes, then fix them later once you talk to native speakers, than not practice at all. For kickstarting a language practice, this site honestly seems ideal..

andrepd 4y ago
Eh, I tested it with a language I speak and it was almost comically bad. Grammar constructions nobody would use, mixing vocabulary from two different variants in the same sentence, etc.

nmfisher 4y ago

I don't want to say "recipe for disaster", but as someone working on a similar app, it's definitely a challenge. It's one of the reasons I stayed away from a pure ML/language modelling approach. It's really easy for models to get things wrong - for example, elsewhere in this thread there's a Chinese sentence about arranging furniture but the word "arrange" isn't really right (it's more "arrange" in the sense of "arranging a delivery", rather than "arranging a number of objects", and sounds like it's been auto-translated from English). When I started I wanted to be sure that every single word/sentence was "correct" (i.e. a native speaker agreed that all the words/grammar were correct/natural in that context). LMs have improved since I started, but for me, that requirement still stands and ML approaches still need a heavy human touch IMO.