Language Log

It's already happening.

Of course, we don't want our students to use AI software to help them write their papers, but the fact of the matter is that some of them, especially among those who have poor English writing skills, are already routinely doing so.  Their attitude seems to be that they will do the basic research and sketching out of the argument, and then they have AI tools make it sound nice.  In some cases, they even ask AI bots to assist them with the data search that goes into their paper.

Some may argue that this is completely unacceptable, that such students should be expelled right away, but where do you draw the line on computer assisted research and writing?  Moreover, this is clearly not the same thing as plagiarism, because the individual who is relying on a chatbot to help him or her is not appropriating the intellectual property of another person.  He/she is utilizing material that he/she specifically requested a machine to create / produce on his / her behalf and at his / her direction.  In other words, the electronic tools are acting as extensions of his / her brain.

Screenshots from @泰拳刚猛 on Weibo:

Another of those kraftvoll German words that grips you viscerally and won't let you go, like Schadenfreude (memes).  Naturally, you could also say "Eskapismus", "Wirklichkeitsflucht", or "Weltflucht" to get across roughly the same idea, but it just wouldn't have the oomph of Realitätsflucht.

What made me think of "Realitätsflucht" at the present juncture?  This article by john Schindler:

Top U.S. Spies Warn: War with China Looms…And It’s Not Looking Good

The intelligence alarm is pinging Red in the Western Pacific – but is anybody, even the White House, paying attention?

Top Secret Umbra (7/18/23)

Competition among various AI services will spur them to further heights.

ChatGPT, Bing, Bard and DeepL: Which one offers the best Japanese-to-English translation?

by Karin Kaneko, Japan Times (7/18/23)

Kaneko, working with her editors at Japan Times, devised an ingenious test for comparing the quality of several translation tools in different categories of writing.  Since this experiment is so innately interesting and inherently revelatory, I will provide extensive quotations, adding romanization of the Japanese passages from GT (not an easy task for me!).  To be fair to GT, and simply out of curiosity to see how it compares with the newer type of AI translation services, I will also invite GT to translate all three of the chosen passages.  N.B.:  All three of the GT English translations have been added by me.

Whatever that means.

That's what we get when we enter into AI translation software (GT, Baidu, Bing, DeepL) this key term — "双泛" — from this important policy document concerning the governance of Xinjiang issued by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Committee of the CCP.

Shuāng 双 is simple:  it means "double".  Fair enough.  But 泛 in this disyllabic expression is notoriously difficult to deal with.  It can be pronounced either fàn, in which case it means  "to float on water; to drift; to spread out; to be suffused with; to flood; to overflow; superficial; non-specific; extensive; general; pan-; careless; reckless", fěng, in which case it means "to turn over; to topple over; to be destroyed; to be defeated; to fall", or fá, in which case it signifies the sound of water.

"Ben Crump retained by group of Northwestern athletes amidst hazing scandal", WGN News 7/17/2023:

EVANSTON, Ill. — A group of athletes from Northwestern University has retained a prominent civil rights and personal injury attorney in the midst of the hazing scandal within the football program.

On Monday morning, Ben Crump along with co-counsel Steven M. Levin of Chicago-based Levin & Perconti announced that they’ve been retained by eight former student-athletes at the school.

In a news release, the lawyers say they were subject to the hazing and are also in conversations with others as well.

Photo taken in a Shanghai hotel:

Photo taken outside a casino in Tainan, Taiwan:

Bilingual label for a wall painting at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, Gansu, China:

Who would have thought?

Even North America’s Elk Have Regional Dialects

Why do Pennsylvania elk sound different from Colorado elk?

By Kylie Mohr, The Atlantic Monthly (July 16, 2023)

—–

It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky-blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets across the grassy meadow. A minute later, another bull answers from somewhere in the shadows.

Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now new research has found that male elks’ bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live. Other studies have shown that whale, bat, and bird calls have dialects of sorts too, and a team led by Jennifer Clarke, a behavioral ecologist at the Center for Wildlife Studies and a professor at the University of La Verne, in California, is the first to identify such differences in any species of ungulate.

…

tl;dr: RFK Jr. asserted recently that "COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people", while "the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese", also implying that this "racial and ethnic differential" means that the virus may have been created as an "ethnic bio weapon". In response to objections, he defended his assertion on the basis of total misrepresentation of a scientific publication, itself problematic. Details below…

I've had two radically divergent experiences with internet advertising. On one hand, certain sites (and email teasers) are suspiciously good at showing me ads related to things I've searched for or even just written about in an email. But on other sites, in contrast, the ads generally show me things that don't fit me at all: jewelry, perfume, women's dresses, industrial hosing, machines for mass-production of paper bags, point-of-sale systems, cosmetics, …

The second kind of sites are mostly magazines, newspapers, scientific journals, etc., and so I figure that those ads are just the same mostly-not-for-me things I might see in old-fashioned paper issues from the same sources. But some of the badly-targeted ads don't fit that narrative either — for example, this one, which has popped up for me, multiple times, in several different on-line publications recently. Here's a sample sighting, with a bit of the (totally irrelevant) textual context:

This short video claims that these two men speak perfect Korean with a Pyeongyang accent.