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Learning a Language With ChatGPT Is a Waste Of Time
Especially as a Beginner, It’s Impossible to Know If the Information You’re Getting Is True
Trust But Verify: The Problem with ChatGPT and Language Learning
So before we get started I think I should state the obvious, there’s an inverse correlation between people relying on ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn languages and language teachers — like me — being out of a job. Much like in other industries these programs are an existential threat when the people in charge of funding language education don’t really care about the quality of that education.
But this isn’t only about my own self-preservation, ChatGPT doesn’t know anything. It’s not intelligent and it doesn’t have any experience or deep understanding of any topic. Instead, it generates responses based on probabilities — predicting which words are likely to come next based on the quality of their training data.
It’s a bit more complicated than “it’s like predictive text on your phone” but we can mostly avoid that complexity here. What it does mean is the information these LLMs produce isn’t necessarily true or false — it’s just likely. And for language learners, especially beginners, that’s a huge…
