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Oddly enough, LLM generated text is going to be far less likely to sound like a non-native speaker writing though, is the thing. Once you sort of understand the
by XorNot 2y ago
Oddly enough, LLM generated text is going to be far less likely to sound like a non-native speaker writing though, is the thing. Once you sort of understand the differences in grammar rules, or just from experience, certain types of non-native english always have a feel to them which reflects the mismatch between two languages - i.e. Chinese-English rough translations tend to retain the Chinese grammar structure and also mix up formalisms of words.
LLM text just plain doesn't do this: they're very good at writing perfectly formed English, but it just winds up saying nothing (and models like ChatGPT have been optimized so they end up having a particular voice they speak in as well).
- Swizec 2y ago> certain types of non-native english always have a feel to them which reflects the mismatch between two languages This. My partner always speaks frenglish (french english) after talking to her parents. You have to know a little French to understand her sentences. They’re all English words, but the phraseology is all French. I do the same with Slovenian. The words are all English, but the shape is Slovenian. It adds a lot of soul to your words. It can also be topic dependent. When I describe memories from home in English, the language sounds more Slovenian. Likewise when I talk about American stuff to my parents, my Slovenian sounds more English. ChatGPT would lose all that color. Read Man In The High Castle to see this for yourself. Whole book is English but you can tell the different nationalities of each character because the shape of their English changes. Philip K Dick used this masterfully.
- Tainnor 2y ago> Whole book is English Amusingly, I think this phrase illustrates your point. To the best of my knowledge, a native speaker (which I'm not) would always say "The whole book is (in?) English", leaving off articles seems to be very common for Slavic people (since I believe you don't really have them in your languages).
- Twisol 2y agoJust to corroborate as a native English speaker, yes, in my experience the "the" would only be left off in quite informal registers or in haste.
- benatkin 2y agoIt also helps refute the point because you could certainly ask an LLM to speak as though they’re a character from the book. And if what it does now is unimpressive, it might be a good thing to use to monitor the rapid progress of LLMs.
- userbinator 2y agoleaving off articles seems to be very common for Slavic people Whenever I come across text that has a lot of missing articles, the voice inside my head automatically changes to a Russian accent; and in the instances where I've bothered to find out the author, it was always someone from Russia or some other ex-USSR country, so it seems I've already ingrained this characteristic at a subconscious level.
- Tainnor 2y agoPoles, Czechs etc. also do this and IMHO, their accent sounds quite different from the Russian one.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoI think this is more about formality and modern usage. I'm nearly 50 and am British. I sometimes write in this abbreviated form, omitting things like articles when they are unnecessary. Especially in text messages, social media posts, etc.
- physicsguy 2y agoI used to work in academia with a Chilean guy who added extra articles where they weren’t needed and a Slovakian guy who didn’t put any in at all. I had fun editing the papers we wrote!
- 2y ago
- benatkin 2y agoThere is sure to be lots of training data from people with French as a first language and English as a second language that can be pulled up with some prompting.
- Tainnor 2y agoLLM certainly does write perfectly grammatical and idiomatic English (I haven't tried enough other languages to know if this is true for, say, Japanese, too). But regular people all have their own idiosyncratic styles - words and turns of phrases they like using more than others, preferred sentence structures and lengths, different levels of politeness, deference and assertiveness, etc. LLM output to me usually sounds very sanitised style-wise (not just content-wise), some sort of lowest-common-denominator language, which is probably why it sounds so corporate-y. I guess you can influence the style by clever prompt engineering, but I doubt you'd get a very unique style this way.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago> some sort of lowest-common-denominator language LLM's output the statistically most average sequence of tokens (there's no intelligence there, "artificial" or otherwise), so yeah, that's by design.
- xcv123 2y agoIt can emulate a bad English speaker if prompted to do that.
- otabdeveloper4 2y agoYes, there's enough explicitly tagged bad English in the training dataset to make a valid average approximation.
- xcv123 2y agoNo. Not explicitly tagged. They are initially trained on vast amounts of data which are not tagged. You fundamentally misunderstand how this works. The LLMs learn the various grammars and "accents" implicitly. They automatically differentiate these grammars. Sounds like you still have this idea that LLMs are a giant Markov chain. They are not Markov chains. They are deep neural networks with hundreds of layers and they automatically model relations at extremely deep levels of abstraction.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Chinese-English rough translations tend to retain the Chinese grammar structure Those would be _really_ rough translations. Yes, I've seen "It's an achieve my dream's place" written, but that was in an essay written for high school.
- dale_glass 2y agoLLMs do whatever you ask them to. They have a default, but they can be directed to use a different response style. And of course you could build a corpus of text written by Chinese English speakers for more authenticity.