Please consider removing the Explain feature entirely

I want to tell a short story to all the people who say they find the Explain feature useful and would be disappointed if it were removed.

Before the Americas were discovered in the Middle Ages, sugar was exorbitantly expensive. No regular person could afford it, only kings and lords and dukes and such. The sugar canes of which sugar is made require a tropical climate, so they were grown only in India and were called the “reeds that produce honey without bees”. It was extremely labour intensive to make sugar out of these canes, and farmers had to break their backs in a hellish heat.

The sugar was imported from India for prohibitively high prices and was used by the ruling class as a “secret ingredient” to improve the taste of disgusting bitter medicine.

When the Americas were discovered, the Europeans learned that there was another place on earth, besides India, where the climate was right to plant sugar canes. Of course, it was still labour intensive and therefore expensive. But by moving to slave labour, the plant owners could drastically lower the price of the sugar that was exported to Europe.

Thanks to slavery, regular people could now finally also enjoy the sweet, sweet sugar. Regular people started to sweeten their tea, to produce bon-bons, et cetera. But working on the sugar plants, in the tropical climate, riddled with Malaria-carrying mosquitos, as a slave, was still hell. Millions of African-Americans died: of exhaustion, of diseases, of whiplashes and other “punishments” by the cruel slave owners. I hope I have to tell nobody that slavery is one of the worst atrocities committed by humanity.

I am very sorry if I offend anyone, but when I read some of the answers in this forum, all I read is, “I like sugar. I really like how my tea tastes after I sweetened it with sugar. I would be very disappointed if the sugar were taken away from me.”

Just to be very clear, before anyone comes after me, I’m not accusing you of slavery or any such thing. The horrors of slavery on these sugar plants didn’t happen because the Europeans hated the slaves slaving away on the sugar plants in some distant land. These horrors happened because the Europeans didn’t care about the slaves. They didn’t even think about them. They only ever cared about how much better their tea tasted with some sugar in it. They only ever cared about their own experience.

So many answers in this community remind me of this. They only stress how ChatGPT helps them with their target language, and completely neglect the other sides of the issue.

Let me ask you all a question: Is the difference between having and not having some sugar in your f***ing tea worth the unimaginatively large suffering that is very purposefully kept away from you becoming aware of it? And then tell me again you’d be disappointed if the sugar exports and exploitation of slaves were stopped after people finally found their moral conscience.

Sorry everyone but for me, this is far too political for our friendly forum.

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I appreciate the passion here! We’re going to keep the explanations for now, and will revisit as the technology and our usage of it changes.

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I wish it weren’t. I hate politics as much as the next person. I’d much rather hear none of it, and be left alone so that I can focus on learning languages and happier things than politics.

But Big Tech and GenAI are inherently political.

You can’t just integrate GenAI into your app, say “Please don’t remove the GenAI that I like so much, I’d be disappointed if you did,” and then seek the easy way out once the negative aspects are brought to light, saying “This is becoming too political for me,” effectively shutting down the conversation if that stance were enforced by the moderators of the forum as is so often the case in other places.

I wasn’t the one who integrated ChatGPT into Clozemaster. If ChatGPT had never been integrated into Clozemaster, we never would have had this uncomfortably political discussion. As long as Clozemaster makes use of AI, @mike must also allow critical/political discussions about AI that highlight the dark sides of AI if he wants to allow all sides a voice. By the way, @mike, I appreciate how you handle the communication regarding this issue. :+1:

Again, I hate that it’s like this just as much as you do, but it is what it is. (People who don’t want to hear about this topic can hide the thread by clicking on the drop-down menu in the bottom left and change it to “Muted”.)

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Thanks @mike, your speedy replies are always a pleasant surprise and appreciated.

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Hey, we all have opinions and the opportunity to post them but I’m sure mine will not “effectively shut down” any further discussion. In all the time it took to write and read all this, reckon I could have cracked the Italian congiuntivo: -) (Just gentle humour). In bocca al lupo!

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This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

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I see you like to use the word “spineless” quite a lot. In Italian “smidollato” sounds pretty close. Anyway it made me smile to think of you posting your thoughts on the now defunct Duolingo forum; you would have come across some “interesting” mods there, for sure.

Moving on though, which of your languages are you enjoying the most?