[westernaccess]

Totally agreed. I'm biased because I learn languages to mostly read texts in original languages. Narratives with well-crafted prose can have hundreds of years of linguistic and stylistic histories, as well as contemporary vernacular, which can tell more about a language than just understanding the plot of the story. I don't think that can ever be fully replaced by an LLM.

There are thousands of short stories at every level of language understanding for nearly every language in existence. I would be more interested in using AI for the languages that don't have these. (say, endangered/extinct languages, oral languages, etc)

[famouswaffles]

>Narratives with well-crafted prose can have hundreds of years of linguistic and stylistic histories, as well as contemporary vernacular, which can tell more about a language than just understanding the plot of the story.

This seems like a werid hangup for what is essentially a substitute for graded readers for language learners. You're not getting any of the things you mentioned going the "human" route.

No one is saying go read these stories over full blown novels. There's no complexity difference between full blown novels and most native short stories either, just length so that's not really an option.

If you could read at that level, you wouldn't be using this or the non-LLM alternative anyway.

[westernaccess]

Just because a children's story, for example, is "simple" doesn't mean it isn't inflected by human complexities.

When you're learning a language, your brain is going through a unique process of both attention to small detail and rote memorization. If you see a pattern often enough at an early stage of language learning, you'll most likely carry that with you at later stages. Even if you don't notice it at first.

Would you trust an AI to present you with accurate language patterns--speech, vernacular, etc?

[famouswaffles]

>Just because a children's story, for example, is "simple" doesn't mean it isn't inflected by human complexities.

Sure. And again this is why lots of people say recommending a Children's book or show is really a bad idea for beginner learners. Graded readers are an entirely different thing from children's fiction.

>Would you trust an AI to present you with accurate language patterns--speech, vernacular, etc?

Language patterns in text ? Yes. There's nothing special about it lol. For all of GPT-4's misgivings, "wrong" language patterns for English isn't one of them. How it writes usually is just the default hammered in by RLHF and can easily diverge when instructed. So if a native in some other language gives the A-Ok on a piece of text then that's it.