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I work a lot with non-native English speakers and I think ChatGPT has definitely improved things, especially when they want to try to explain more complex aspects of the business, their funding needs, answer certain questions. I used to get a lot of emails so poorly written and barely comprehensible that it would take much longer to parse the meaning than if they had just sent the email in whatever native language and let me Google translate it. Mostly these are intelligent people, they’re just too proud to hire a translator (but not to use an LLM).
To me this is kind of a mass production of furniture or fast fashion thing. At the high end, the amount of genuinely enjoyable and well-produced writing will decline, not even because LLMs aren’t capable of it but because they will default to simple, emotive English in the new style, and because even good writers won’t be bothered in most cases to write themselves or to tweak prompts for better output.
But for the 99% of people who either don’t speak the language they’re ’writing in’ natively or don’t have good verbal ability, communication can be much easier, the gap between what is in their head and something someone else can read has, in my opinion, shrunk.
I would say the advantage of ChatGPT over a traditional translator is that you can interrogate it. For example, say you get an email from your boss you do not understand. You can ask it not only for a translation but also about subtext or tone, even to rephrase the translation in a way that preserves meaning. It seems to me that if you take advantage of this even 20% of the time, you come out ahead, because despite obvious model weaknesses and potential errors, direct translation has its own misunderstandings too (which seem worse).
Ditto for the composition side of things. You can do stuff like compose a foreign language email and then have it back-translate it to you as a way of double checking you said what you intended to say. Sure, AI might worsen the writing,
Alas, most humans lack this kind of imagination, but optimistically we can teach people how to get more out of their LLM usage.
All that said the original post as I understood it was more about using LLMs as a language learning tool, and I think there, they have a potential point. The biggest counterpoint also comes from interactivity: ever tried using the advanced voice mode? It's pretty neat, and allows verbal practice in a safe, no-judgement, infinite-time environment, which is quite literally the biggest obstacle to language learning 95% of people face! So if the AI sometimes misleads in correcting a passage, I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff for the extra practice time, considering how frequently language learners basically stop learning, or give up learning, at a certain point.
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ChatGPT hacked their brains and convinced them that using machine translation is OK. Because before, their ego was too big to copy paste the output out of google translate, but somehow when it's ChatGPT it's totally ok.
Of course by giving up on writing English in the first place, they will also never learn.
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