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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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  1. This is a very bad way to showcase ChatGPT's writing chops. When I use it, by virtue of personally having native fluency, I am far better equipped to critique its output. The original user, a Japanese person somewhat conversational in the language, is simply not in a position to be able to tell where it could have made better stylistic choices. Note that my objection above is to do with the fact that the availability of ChatGPT represents a massive improvement over the previous status-quo. If he had simply asked it to translate his original Japanese, it would have done a perfectly fine job.

  2. LLMs are not a monolithic entity. When most people talk about ChatGPT, they're ignorant of the fact that there are options beyond the slop-tier 4o. You may or may not know the difference, but the average normie complaining doesn't. My own workflow involves using multiple different models, multiple attempts, prompts that I know qualitatively improve results and my own ability to discern between outputs.

For example, when I ask for a translation that preserves the writers' rather unique character:

Kimi K2:

Today's stream was absolutely perfect! The second I dropped the comment "Please step on me, Step-on-me!" my oshi, Haachama herself, shot back with "Gross!"—and I was already soaring. Then she hit me with "You're such a perv!" and I just about ascended straight to heaven. I'm floating in pure bliss right now; this is the most peaceful moment of my entire life. And the thing that's got me buzzing more than anything? Haachama's birthday live is going down on Sunday, August 10 at 9:00 PM! I'm ready to cheer my lungs out. Just picturing that day makes me feel like I'm literally sipping her bathwater—yeah, that level of hype!

Gemini 2.5 Pro:

Tonight's stream was PERFECT! I commented, "Funde kuda-STEP ON ME!"* and my oshi, Haachama, actually responded with "Kimoi!" ("Gross!"). And then she even added, "You're such a perv!" THIS IS INSANE!! I feel like I'm in heaven right now. This is the most peaceful moment of my entire life. And to top it all off, the thing I'm looking forward to most is Haachama's birthday live on Sunday, August 10th at 21:00!! I'm gonna support her with everything I've got. Just imagining that day's stream makes me feel like I'm drinking her bathwater.

I don't know basically any Japanese, and I'm pretty far from streaming culture -- but based on my knowledge of how these things work I'm pretty sure both are failing badly in their interpretation of 'support on live stream'; I'm pretty sure he means that he plans to, like, give her money? Probably not all of his money ("support her with everything I've got"), but certainly "cheering my lungs out" would be atypical behaviour on a livestream, no?

He probably means cheering. The Japanese message uses the loanword "live", which refers to special events like concerts, not regular live streams. You support concerts by showing up and cheering or clapping, and she's describing her birthday stream as a "horror live", so he's probably intending to watch the whole stream and spam emoji in chat whenever something noteworthy happens. This is pretty common behavior for concerts on YouTube.

Does he? Wouldn't surprise me, but I think we need weebs subject matter experts to disambiguate on our behalf.

I mentioned it in another comment but the typical workflow of intermediate speakers would be to write the work directly in the target language, rather than translating it. Machine translation with LLM is certainly pretty good right now but using it doesn't help anyone learn the language.

We certainly might be heading towards a world where everyone uses machine translation by default and nobody bothers learning a new language, but I'm certainly a luddite in that lane.

the availability of ChatGPT represents a massive improvement over the previous status-quo.

I don't agree. Better translation tools like deepl have been around for a while, and arxiv papers haven't shown that gpt series models seriously dominate dedicated translation models. But on the other hand ChatGPT is giving everyone a huge gun that people can shoot themselves with because it does things besides translate.

I would even argue that by virtue of using ChatGPT wrong, the user ended up with a worse result versus just using a shitty translation tool like Google translate.