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Tiny Rant About AI

@kaytspapertrail -


I know this is going to make me sound like a bit of a 'grumpy bunny' ... or more likely an angry old biddy shaking her cane at the whippersnappers on her lawn .... but ...

AI is killing my enjoyment of YouTube video consumption. 

The voiceovers are the number one culprit. They CONSTANTLY mispronounce certain words, betraying themselves in the process.

Yes, I know there are varying accents in the world, and I try never to hate on legit human mispronunciations. There are not only myriad dialects and accents within a language, it's always possible it's the speaker's L2 (or 3 or 4). And I heard somewhere that mispronouncing something often means you learned it by reading it (and reading should always be encouraged!). 

And we probably all have at least one word in our native languages that stumped us the first time we read it instead of hearing it. I still remember mine: chaos. I had to read it aloud in class as a child, and I hadn't a clue that such a totally familiar word was spelled like that.

But the AI-generated voiceovers consistently get things wrong which context would prevent 99.9% of humans from ever doing. It's especially tripped-up my heteronyms. Read/read and live/live are fast becoming nails on a chalkboard to me.

My second pet-peeve is the repeated use of "How _______ looks/seems/acts (etc.) like" - the "like" is superfluous (and offensive to the ear) for any native speaker of English with a reading level above 6th grade. 

You can have the sentence, "How peanut butter tastes" or you can have "Peanut butter tastes like _____" but the "how" and the "like" just do not belong together in such a sentence. To be precise, 'how' is an interrogative adverb that does not fit with the preposition 'like'. 

"How peanut butter tastes like" is just wrong, but someone seems to have misinformed AI.

Unfortunately, I have a sinking feeling that in 10 years we will probably all change the way we say it rather than successfully teaching AI such nuances. 

I suspect humans are more malleable than machines. Which is just a nice way of saying we're apparently too stupid to be their teachers.

 

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