Most people learn a new language in order to make headway in their career, be able to move abroad or just to speak with people of that country or consume their media. For people who learn for these reasons, will advances in AI and LLMs make learning a language more obsolete? Are there actually less people picking up a foreign language since LLMs opened to the public? What about the “human connection” which translators won’t be able to replicate?
I guess we’re still far off from real-time translation without delay in every kind of situation, especially since making sense of a sentence in many languages is very dependant on context or some word at the end of the sentence that changes the meaning of the first few words spoken.
I see learning a language as a way not only to communicate with different people, but to also learn a different way of seeing the world. That’s also kind of why I’m against a global language replacing all others: in a language, the culture of the people speaking it is intrinsically linked. Wiping out a language means wiping out the culture. People don’t think the same in English as they do in Mongolian. Even the concept of “time” can be different, depending on how it’s expressed in another language. Translators at the moment aren’t able to capture all these nuances and differences, even if they sometimes succeed.
AI will never make a good enough translator. It can work for basic translations, but even then it has big failures. Assuming those small things could be resolved (but only to an extent since it could never be 100%), it still will fundamentally never be able to fully replace a person.
There is so much more to knowing a language than literal translation.
You’ll never understand memes using machine translation. Even if AI can do something like “explain why this image is funny”, it just doesn’t hit the same.I’m 51. Sometimes I ask AI to explain memes that are already plain English.
Okay KnowYourMeme is a better source but these days AI will probably just read it from there anyway.
Learning a language develops your brain in very weird ways, like nothing else can. There is some research which showed that bilingual or higher people had higher intelligence in general.
It can be done for self improvement and fun too.
Was going to say the same thing. Learning languages and doing puzzles are great ways to build and maintain mental acuity as you age. I have the puzzle part down, need to get off my butt and learn some new languages!
Start small if you have trouble getting into it. If you know English, start with a Latin derived language.
No man. It’s great for utility like traveling through a country and being able to ask people things or get something done. But it doesn’t foster real connections nearly as well. People will be far less likely to befriend you if you have to awkwardly talk through a translator all the time.
Language is not just about getting your idea across. It shapes how we think.
But to answer your question, if you speak English, no.
This is a weird take. It seems to argue against not learning a language because of AI, but… also to not have any data that AI will lower the interest in learning languages?
Look, I have enough experience with monolinguals to tell you the arguments they were using were already bullshit. And we had more than decent machine translation before LLMs. If anything LLM translations, particularly running locally, are slower and less reliable than older alternatives.
Let’s stop giving the tech more credit than it deserves until it proves itself, hm?
Also, most of that “language defines thinking” stuff is debunked pseudoscience. Learn a language to gain a new skill and open up a new culture without filters, but stop it with the exoticising nonsense.
Personally, I think it’s a great social experience. Once you move past the “I’m going to speak imperfectly until I learn,” thing, you basically get to babel like a baby as an adult. People seem to love it, too. Everytime I tell someone I’m learning a language and they speak that language, they’re always excited to help me practice.
I think it helps with your primary language too. A lot of languages are related, so learning about the structure of one can help you recognize patterns in another. Since you learn about new grammar rules in your native language first, it’s especially useful if it’s been a while since you’ve taken an English class.
That’s also kind of why I’m against a global language replacing all others
That’s handy, because the whole promise of the AI babel fish is that we finally won’t need an imperialist global language.
IMO you’ve got this entirely the wrong way round.
Nope, I can tell you after 4 years in South Korea without speaking the language, the LLMs help to navigate websites and your phone a bit. But that’s it. If you go to the bank or convenience store or if someone calls you you’re still fucked.
If you go to the bank or convenience store or if someone calls you you’re still fucked.
Yeah, and even if you know the basics, you’re fucked as soon as the conversation goes off the standard script. Then imagine going to a doctor with chatgpt.
I would say you answered yourself, it will take years before AI is good enough as a reliable real-time translation.
And the current LLMs have a tendency to hallucinate combine that with mistranslations and lack of the nuances you mention.
When I think of LLM hallucinations this Monty Python skit comes into mind:
Learning stuff will never not be useful. All the ai tools in the world will not change that fact.
Maybe in the future you could have an AI implant to take care of all translations while you’re talking to people, and this idea has been explored in scifi many times. I think the babel fish was the funniest way to implement this idea in a story.
If that sort of translator becomes widespread, it would definitely change the status learning languages has. That would also mean you have to think about a potential man in the middle attack. Can you trust the corporation that runs the AI? What if you want to have a discussion about a topic that isn’t approved by your local tyrannical dictatorship? MITM attack can become a serious concern. Most people probably don’t care that much, so they won’t learn new languages, but some people really need to.
I learned languages for the same reason I learn most things: mere curiosity and the self satisfaction of improvement. I moved to France cause I knew French and I married a Brit cause I speak English, so if anything languages make things interesting. If you don’t learn things simply because learning is fun and it’s better to put something of value in your brain than nonsense then, idk, shame on you?
I appreciate the implied optimism on the future state of the world.
the opposite! ai is great for helping learn a language, part of my goal is to get away from english and us centric everything, if i just continue to watch other cultures in english i’m not doing anything really except watch more english language content
