this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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But you can't always use a dictionary to understand the use of words or phrases in novel contexts. For instance, maybe a phrase contains meaning not in its literal text, but in its resemblance to a quotation from another work, or to a previous quotation within the same work.
I've taken a classic Swedish poem ("Bron" by Erik Lindorm), and I can't seem to find an explanation of what it means via traditional searching. But when I paste it into ChatGPT and ask what it means, it gives a detailed interpretation.
A human could do the same, but it's unreasonable to expect every learner has a human on standby to cater to their every educational whim at all hours of the day.
LLMs will tell you anything, and if you can't fact check it, you will never know if it's true or not.
If you're fine with believing in random words put together nicely, I can't stop you, but I won't cheer you on, either.
LLMentalist
Your own reference explains how the AI responses are more than just random words put together nicely, and I can and have fact-checked it. It's not a trustworthy tool for many things, but it is useful for language-based pursuits, because language is precisely what it's designed to work with.
For example, I've recently been watching a Chinese period drama and asked ChatGPT what various words were by transcribing how I heard them and explaining the context. It gave me accurate hanzi, pinyin, and definitions as confirmed by dictionary sites. It's been a very valuable tool to me for language learning.
It's a token-based model. Not exactly language.
I'm happy that you feel like it's helping you.
But never trust it.