Hey, Friend,
Thinking about AI. This is something I have been doing a lot. For more than a year now. Alright. Full disclosure first. I like working with computers. Their handwriting is neater than mine. When I use a command line, the graph I “drew” looks so much better. And most importantly, the computer remembers stuff really well. Sometimes too well. My interest in language led me to some branches of artificial intelligence. First, I dabbled in natural language processing (NLP). Then I started learning about it. Writing about it. Not as a computer scientist. As a linguist. As a language teacher. That is why I paid attention when Alan Turing, the father of AI, hypothesized that AI can be useful for language learning. From the late 1990s until the 2010s, I talked about and wrote about AI, as we knew it then, in the context of language education. The computer as a grammar checker, as a writing aid, or as a reading aid. It was challenging. Making the computer analyze language – words and sentences first – was difficult enough. Making the computer analyze a sentence a language learner wrote was even harder. Researchers and graduate students tried different approaches to deal with learner text successfully, or at least a little more successfully. But hardly any of the NLP-based programs for language learning ended up in the classrooms or on the computers of learners. They were too specialized, too unreliable, too expensive to make, and too cumbersome too maintain. We learnt a lot, though, in this work. About computers. And about language learning.
And then in late 2022, Generative AI became a thing. People noticed. Google Translate and DeepL started producing better translations from many languages into many others. ChatGPT spits out texts in more languages than I can read. These tools are faster than proficient writers and certainly faster than even advanced language learners. And. As ChatGPT told me once itself, the tools are mostly more accurate than the majority of language learners in many languages. Not in all of them.
After having left AI alone for some years, I started reading and learning again. I was lucky: I had done it before. Some things in AI looked familiar; others were completely new to me. What had happened? What is happening? Let’s find out together. It takes more than one post to disentangle the many threads … I have been asked to contribute some chapters on AI to books on language learning and technology in the coming months. The invitations to speak about AI before teachers and applied linguists have started coming in. So, I will be sharing some of my notes and my thoughts in this blog.
Why? The topic of generative AI – and AI as a whole – and language and learning a language has a lot to do with complexity and change. It is a topic made for this blog. The growth of AI as we all witnessed it and are witnessing it in the public arena has been exponential. Exponential growth is a feature of some complex processes …
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