Language Log

The battlelines are being drawn ever clearer.  On one side are those who believe that it's all right to use AI to help with the preparation of an (academic) article, essay, or paper.  On the other side are those who think that the utilization of AI is impermissible for such purposes.  As soon as they discern the use of AI in writing a composition, they will dismiss it out of hand.  Use of AI extends to the collection and organization of material to be included in what is being written.

Readers who are sensitive to the stylistics of AI writing can even detect it in punctuation preferences, rhetorical tone, lexical propensities, and so forth.

There are even commercially available "AI detectors", e.g.:  "Pangram can detect AI-generated text even after it has been 'humanized,' or processed by tools that attempt to evade AI detection, ensuring reliable detection."

A student who's been working on LLM-style AI transformations of symbolically-represented music recently tried mapping a (fragment of a piece) back and forth between two genres, e.g. baroque and pop. She found that after a couple of steps, the results reach a fixed point and don't change any more.

This may sound hopelessly old-fashioned.  People were making the accusation more than half a century ago, but the same problems it points to persist even today.

In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is the concept that flawed, biased or poor quality ("garbage") information or input produces a result or output of similar ("garbage") quality. The saying points to the need to improve data quality in, for example, programming. Rubbish in, rubbish out (RIRO) is an alternate wording

The principle applies to all logical argumentation: soundness implies validity, but validity does not imply soundness. In essence, the logic or algorithm may be correct, but using flawed inputs (premises) is still an informal fallacy.

(WP)

The dangers of GIGO / RIRO have only been magnified with the advent of AI.

In part 1 of this post, "The (ir)reality of the MingKwai typewriter" (10/17/25) and many preceding, related posts (see "Selected readings" and the links to which they lead), we saw what a boondoggle and fiasco the Chinese typewriter (especially Lin Yutang's MingKwai) was.  Yet people are still glorifying and extolling the clumsy, clunky, cumbersome Chinese typewriter as though it were leading the IT revolution (when the reality is quite the contrary).  So much hype and sensationalism about the retrograde Chinese typewriter!

The following bilibili video, although in Chinese, will show how complicated and expensive to replicate such a device is:

Well, I'm not so sure about this:

Grammarly recently became part of Superhuman, and then began the shockingly unethical practice of pretending to offer writing advice from living people, without getting their permission or even informing them.

Archeological data with AI- and physics-based modeling explain typhoon-induced disasters in inland China around 3000 yr B.P.
Science Advances, 12.10 (3/4/25)
Ke Ding, Siyang Li, Aijun Ding, Houyuan Lu, Jianping Zhang, Dazhi Xi, Xin Huang, Sijia Lou, Xiaodong Tang, Xin Qiu, Lejun He, Yue Ma, Haoxian Lin, Shiyan Zhang, Derong Zhou, Xiaolu Zhou, Zhe-Min Tan, Congbin Fu, Quansheng Ge

To fully understand the significance of this paper, one must realize that the Central Plains (Zhōngyuán 中原) and Chengdu Plain in Sichuan are crucial, fertile agricultural and economic hubs with deep historical significance. The Central Plains served as the "cradle of Chinese civilization", and was a vital transport corridor in the East Asian Heartland (EAH). The Chengdu Plain has been a perennial "Land of Plenty", supported by the Dūjiāngyàn 都江堰 irrigation system, a miracle of ancient hydraulic engineering still operating today more than two millennia after it was constructed.

For those who don't know what "Chinese Text Project" (CTP) is, here's a:

Brief introduction:

The Chinese Text Project is an online open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. The site attempts to make use of the digital medium to explore new ways of interacting with these texts that are not possible in print. With over thirty thousand titles and more than five billion characters, the Chinese Text Project is also the largest database of pre-modern Chinese texts in existence.

You may wish to read more about the project, view the pre-Qin and Han, post-Han or Wiki tables of contents, or consult the instructions, FAQ, or list of tools. If you're looking for a particular Chinese text, you can search for texts by title across the main textual sections of the site.

(from the CTP homepage)

Text-To-Speech technology has improved enormously over the decades — but there's still some headroom, as a friend has recently underlined for me. He observes that when The Economist magazine first publishes a piece online, it appears with a AI-read audio, and then later with a human-read version:

The rhythm/prosody/pitch (I'm not exactly sure which – all three?) is the same in nearly every sentence and even clause. This high-then-falling pattern is fine in one sentence, but repeated 50 times in a row is awful.

Later, those pieces that make it into the print edition get their own, human-read version. So voilà, you have a perfect before-and-after.

The Chinese Computer: Competition or Cooperation?
book review by
David Moser
Beijing Capital Normal University

Thomas Mullaney’s The Chinese Computer is a fascinating account of the decades-long effort by linguists, computer scientists and engineers to incorporate Chinese characters into the digital age. Drawing on a vast body of historical and scientific sources, the book offers the reader an lively account of the formidable technical challenges involved in creating practical and intuitive input methods for one of the world’s most complex writing systems. The reader will come away with an increased awareness of the contributions that Chinese computing brought to modern computer science.

Chinese scholars and sinologists working in the 1980s and 90s will recall the early generations of Chinese word processors—slow, unreliable, and crash-prone—when every incremental gain in speed or compatibility felt like a small miracle. Thanks to the ingenuity and innovation of computer input developers, today anyone on the planet can create Chinese texts using an impressive ecosystem of powerful and user-friendly tools.

Meet Habibi – the Chinese AI uniting 20 Arabic dialects in a Middle East first
Lead author says there are many differences between Arabic dialects and Modern Standard Arabic, which is used in official circumstances
Zhao Ziwen, SCMP, 28 Feb 2026

The paper that presents this new model is called “Habibi: Laying the Open-Source Foundation of Unified-Dialectal Arabic Speech Synthesis”. It was published last month on arXiv, an open-access repository that is not peer-reviewed.  I will be interested to hear what Language Log readers think of its prospects.

"It cannot read the human heart" by Yan Ge (b/1984), London Review of Books Blog (2/20/26)