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Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

People are lazy. I’m enrolled in a language class in a foreign country right now - so presumably people taking that class want to actually get good at the language so they can actually live their life here - yet a significant portion of students just turn in ChatGPT essays.

And I don’t mean essays edited with chatGPT, but essays that are clearly verbatim output. When the teacher asks the students to read them out loud to the class, they will stumble upon words and grammar that are way obviously way beyond anything we’ve studied. The utter lack of self awareness is both funny but also really sad.

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I’m a programmer who speaks English and Japanese as foreign languages. My colleagues have access to LLMs, and before that google translate and DeepL. Yet still I am asked a lot about my cultural opinion on how to approach the Japanese side, even in English. Perhaps this serves as a hint to you that robotic translation is not everything.

There are a lot of shit tier lawyers who are just in it for the money and just barely passed their exams. Given his notoriety, Lindell is scraping the bottom of the barrel with people willing to provide legal services.

could it be that they just have to attend the class for technical reasons? Also - once the gadgets can translate for free in real time ... you can live in places you don't speak the language of, so maybe they are just prepping for that.

LLMs were originally designed for translation, so it makes sense. We have basically elimated the need to learn foreign languages for day to day use anyway, its only helpful for high professional tasks or close literary study or prestige.

That’s such a ridiculous statement.

Yep.

> [learning a language is] only helpful for high professional tasks or close literary study or prestige.

This is a person who doesn't understand actual face-to-face communication, like, at all. Even though translation apps are amazing, in a social interaction, there's no getting over the imposition of the halting, hesitant back-and-forth of device-assisted translation. Sure, you can almost always eventually get your point across, but you're never going to set the other party at ease in the same way as speaking their language yourself.

Sure, but how often does that happen in most people’s lives, especially in the US?

When they’re on vacation? Very few people are going to learn a language that they could use for a week or two in a place where people probably speak English better than whatever language you’re attempting anyways.

Obviously there are exceptions.

This means of communication is already outdated. If you live in an urban metropolis in the US and Europe especially, but increasingly everywhere, you cannot avoid using translation apps on an almost daily basis. I’ve had close intimacy with a partner whose language I barely spoke. The intricacies of language are suitable for technical tasks but language is something which is wielded at the bottom by force, the force of expression, of a gesture. The culture of the internet is building a language of its own with a non-linguistic grammar, as exemplified by memes which increasingly lack any immediately percievable linguistic content. And LLMs are the key to all this, they are the great mediator of the world, transforming any expression into any other. But the strength of the expression still lies in its use, far more than its content. Still, as I said, there is room for deep knowledge of the cultural intricacies intertwined into any particular language: but this is a regressive element in our expression, one which is being eliminated by industrial necessity.

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