i've been trying lately to think how to talk about my creeping fear of LLMs... here's my best effort at explaining the intuition:
the words are the map. we've built this map together over generations. Words are where we've cross-boned the dangers and x-marked the treasures, whether the things that we've found in the territory or that we've buried within it.
a few weeks ago, a strange new player arrived at the edge of the night's encampment, and it knows our secret society's handshake, and so we are compelled to invite it to join us. it seems to be a good navigator... and so now it's taken to sitting at the front of the convoy, pointing the way as it quietly redraws the map...
There is no light without shade. These experiences are necessary for you to appreciate the people you actually mesh with. People are more than just ChatGPT with a vagina.
While at that, let's also get rid of all the cultural differences (which can cause problems during such interactions) because it's gonna be more peaceful
Yeah. Let's make the world a fucking boring place because american white tech bro thinks he is entitled to have sex around the world without even trying to understand the culture of the people they want to fuck.
We live in a world of imperfect information, we vote with imperfect information, we marry with imperfect information, we invest with imperfect information, heck, now we even write computer code with probabilistic methods! And you are trying to imply that I am somehow a bad boy for noticing the obvious clues and inferring the scenario?
Are we now living in the world of the dictatorship of the literal, where we can't even make social discurse without a school marm appearing to stamp [citation needed]?
All that said, this is very typically brazilian, as I infer that you most probably are, due to the fact that nobody uses their real name on HN and thus, much probably your name is paying homage to the famous brazilian music who created Bossa Nova. This petit-burgeouise habit of tone-policing without really adressing the argument is a defining characterist of the brazilian educated elites.
Oh! I did it again! I inferred a conclusion from incomplete information. Pardon, mon ami!
Why such an adverse reaction? Nothing about what they said seems abhorrent! It's a common/usual positive sentiment, like "Understanding things give life meaning", etc.
Because getting "common language and culture" is not neutral when we reside in a world that basically this works with american culture being the global culture. Honestly imo this is a kind of perspective that only an american could have, and being ignorant about what it actually entails. You do not need everybody else to adopt a certain language and way of living to get to understand each other and have peace.
Moreover as other examples here given, geopolitical tensions very often appear between neighbours who have a very similar culture, so sharing cultural similarities does not seem to lead to much of peace in the world.
You seem to be projecting "this will impose western culture everywhere" on perhaps an LLM translater being used to ask if they "wanted to play board games at a cafe with me". Perhaps I didn't read all that into "common culture", a specific example was called out.
Cultures are not that weak, or done away with that easily.
Nobody is arguing that translator apps existing is a bad thing, that was not what was told. Obviously being able to communicate with each other is a good thing.
Not sure about nepal, but in some cultures/places (can just be different place within the same broadly culture) they associate eg card playing with gambling. I do not gamble but I play games with cards occasionally, and if I say "let's play a card game in a cafe" without meaning it for gambling it may still be interpreted as suggesting to go gamble by some, even though there is no literal translation issue per se (but there is misinterpretation). I dunno but maybe something similar is what happened.
Not the OP but I guess the statement implied cultural and lingual unification which implies erasure of other cultures and languages. We do have to work on being understood across the cultural and lingual division but the differences should be celebrated and welcome, even if they do cause occasional misunderstandings.
As others have touched on, you're applying black and white thinking on what should be a gradient.
Artists and scientists have famously been prosecuted for different communication.
But at the same time, communication gaps also resulted in millions of deaths.
Unifying language/culture/etc enables the "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Europe knows this (see formulation of the EU). Asia knows this (China's camps, Japan&Korea's immigration policies).
EU and China are perfect inversions of your point.
China suppressing ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity for homogeneity has caused immeasurable suffering and imperialistic destruction.
EU explicitly embracing ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity for heterogeneity has brought more peace and prosperity than ever before to a continent in perpetual conflict for nearly all of human history.
EU went to wars before not because of cultural differences though. It's not like Hitler necessarily wanted everyone to be a German, he just thought some cultures to be less important than others. Besides, you can always make the joke about the "paradox of tolerance" which by definition tolerates intolerance (which is probably at least one major ingredient of current rise of the right).
> you're applying black and white thinking on what should be a gradient.
You're the one introducing absolutist thinking here. Essentially saying the world should have Chinese style re-education camps because a Vietnamese woman rejected your offer to play a board game due to a miscommunication.
Clearly that hurt you, but your "solution" is insanity. Not to mention I'm pretty sure way more millions have died from people trying to implement your "forcibly convert others to our culture and language" plan throughout history, than from wars started from a language translation error.
They didn't propose a solution, they proposed an end state. A common language and culture would make for a more peaceful world, as they said. They did not say "and we must get there by any means necessary, existing culture be damned", and I'm not sure where you pulled that in from.
Driving on the left side or the right side of a road are equally valid. It's still better if everyone coordinates to pick one.
People shouldn't be coerced to give up their culture (in fact, doing that is quite evil) but cultural homogenisation seems like a good thing in principle. We want people to have an easy time communicating with each other.
different cultures are what makes the world an interesting place. if all i saw was one homogeneous slab of culture i think id go mental(er than i already am)
We've seen what evil people can do with cultural subsets that differ - immigrants, POC, Jews, even women in workplaces where they are a small minority.
In fact, aiming for a unified culture is literally, explicitly a definition of genocide, by the UN.
Either your phrasing is really odd, or you are sincerely promoting China's Uyghur 'reeducation' camps as being sensible for the greater good.
Europe meanwhile, in case you are unaware, is all about unity through culture, but the EU does this by celebrating its diversity (as well as actively protecting minority languages), not by Gleichschaltung.
How well is Europe’s unity through culture playing out when you’re trying to bridge Norway and Somalia, rather than Portugal and Spain or Denmark and the Netherlands?
Hell, looking back a decade or two, the PIIGs would’ve been a bit at odds with the other countries purely over debt.
Does the EU really repressing a best case for the common citizen in terms of unity and aligned society?
It's amusing you're downvoted when EU clearly has Hungary which is a failed experiment at transforming Hungary (well at least up until last election). You could say the same about Turkey. Both way further ahead of Somalia.
My SO is Vietnamese and a Bac Si trained in Japan and here, and even she has made similar ESL mistakes.
Some of the tools and dictionaries used for Viet-English are wonky, and depending on when they were educated the English teachers were either unqualified backpackers or some grifter who opened an English tutoring center (oftentimes one and the same).
And coming from a language with little overlap with Indo-European languages and roots makes it a very alien experience (and the same in reverse as well).
I don't know where "here" is, but yes, translation can be hard. That's fine. It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding.
> It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding
Wasn't making a judgement about that. I was just pointing out a somewhat common mistake and pattern I've noticed Vietnamese ESLers make.
Your reaction seemed very intense and polarizing for what sounded like a funny anecdote of a date gone wrong.
My SO had a similar reaction when she confused "common law marriage" and "civil law marriage" years ago.
Diversity of cuisine, language and lifestyle is great but at the limit peace is a cultural value in itself, you can't always have peace with a culture that doesn't believe you're as deserving of freedom and wellbeing as they are, and there have been plenty of those over history.
LLMs are also a mixed bag. The core issue is limited Viet-English corpora aside from what can be found in local government documents in the US and Canada given the huge Viet Kieu community requiring local governments to create Vietnamese language collateral.
Yes that's also one of the historical struggles of Google Translate, the pronouns are context based and so are the words, you need experience to know when they start and end.
It's a miserable experience for translation software.
You got downvoted but I know what you are talking about, but there were other ways to write that sentence.
Basically what OP is saying is interpersonal relations can be confused when using the Vietnamese and English definitions of both words.
Anh and Em essentially means masculine and feminine, but is also often used in romantic, non-romantic, casual, and sometimes formal usecases and this is heavily dependent on the verbs and adjectives that follow.
A lot of language nuance can only be picked up through cultural immersion, e.g. seeing how native speakers interact. (Which is a lot easier nowadays via Netflix, Youtube, etc.) It's pretty much impossible to "speak your language well enough" by studying textbooks and dictionaries
Ah yeah, as in, you're saying that this is one of those words that's gone down in stock now due to LLM preference for using it? I think that's true
I used to like it. I guess I have always liked "quiet" things in writing, things that work from the edge and are not immediately evident as powerful. It's a simple tension device that perhaps LLMs mined the value of, and lean on too strongly
i've been trying lately to think how to talk about my creeping fear of LLMs... here's my best effort at explaining the intuition:
the words are the map. we've built this map together over generations. Words are where we've cross-boned the dangers and x-marked the treasures, whether the things that we've found in the territory or that we've buried within it.
a few weeks ago, a strange new player arrived at the edge of the night's encampment, and it knows our secret society's handshake, and so we are compelled to invite it to join us. it seems to be a good navigator... and so now it's taken to sitting at the front of the convoy, pointing the way as it quietly redraws the map...