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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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?

yes, but, lol

For English to less popular languages, the Clozemaster database has thousands of sentences per language. For English to more popular languages, tens of thousands apiece… with zero overlap. (Lots of the source sentences are the same across languages, but that’s immaterial here— if you translate one sentence into 23 languages, you’re still going to need 23 separate explanations, each one written individually from scratch.)

Soooo. In total, that’s at least several hundred thousand explanations, and possibly even millions of explanations—of which a skilled human could only hope to write a few per hour, with nowhere close to the word-by-word treatment that chatGPT outputs.
Even at minimum wage levels, that’d be millions of dollars’ worth of work. Realistically—given how few people are actually capable of writing clear and correct grammar explanations (most native or otherwise fluent speakers of any given language rely completely on experience and intuition, so only a tiny minority of them will even have any explicit idea WHY each piece of a randomly chosen sentence is correct… and out of that already tiny minority, far fewer still will consistently be able to formulate written explanations that are clear and cogent enough to be understood by readers who are studying alone)— you’re looking at tens of millions of dollars, given the kind of wages you’d have to pay for work of that quality. Imagine the Pro fees we’d have to fork out to cover that😵‍💫

… and that’d be the cost of human-produced explanations just in English, ahhahhaha. Not even touching all those other source languages.

I mean. There are other corrections I would love to see on here—especially for pairings of two non-English languages, which contain huge numbers of actual errors in the base Q&A (not just in explanations).

E.g., Russian from Italian, and Italian from Russian:
These databases—at least the great vast majority of them—have clearly been constructed by just daisy-chaining data from the English-Russian and English-Italian databases. (This is the best that can be hoped for out of all automated procedures, since there’s no such thing as direct auto-translation between non-English languages—ALL existing auto-translators from western tech companies route everything through English, which would introduce even more errors and ambiguities, like way way WAY more.)
The problem is, because English is the intermediate stopover point of this process, absolutely everything that’s baked into Russian or Italian but not English grammar—and absolutely every instance of distinct forms in Italian or Russian whose closest English translations look the same—is lost going TO English, and therefore has to be randomized (basically just “guessed” by the system) FROM English to Russian/Italian.

The three most common of these are:

• Russian past-tense verbs are gendered; English and Italian verbs are gender invariant.

• Possessives are gendered to match the possessor in English and Russian—not in completely matching ways, but crudely enough to make a go of it—but do not change with the gender of thing possessed.
Italian (like every other Romance language) is the opposite on both counts: “her”, “his”, and “its” are all the same word in Italian—but that word takes on different forms depending on what fills the blank in “his/her/its _____”.

• English only has one “you”—whether singular or plural, format or informal.
Russian has one word for informal singular “you”, and another that doubles as formal singular “you” and plural “you” (also how French does this).
Italian has one word for informal singular “you”, a second word for informal plural “you”, a third word for formal singular “you” (which is the same word as “she”!!) and a FOURTH word for formal plural “you” (which is the same word as “they”!).

Just from these 3 differences alone, in either direction of Russian <—> Italian there are loads of wrong translations in the database.

• Loads of stuff ends up gendered the wrong way.

• EVERY instance of “you” is always completely randomized between formal/informal in both Russian and Italian, very often in non matching ways (since English has nothing even remotely close to formal/informal register). Singular vs. plural “you” is also, separately randomized in both RU and IT, unless it’s fixed by some other word(s) in context… and the "you"s even occasionally cross-pollinate with “she” and “they”, too.

• not even getting into the hot mess with possessives.

where the point is, if you were going English to Italian or English to Russian, then you’d constantly have to guess these things (and add all the other possible forms into the “Alternative correct answers” box)—but at least you’d know you had to guess.
In Russian to Italian or vice versa, on the other hand, plenty of the translations are unambiguously WRONG for reasons that are rlly nobody’s “fault”, and that are unfixable except by a person with professional-level competency in both of those languages.
These would be nice to fix first, before addressing peripheral features like longform explanations—but again, that’s laughably unaffordable for a small developer.

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Welcome! Great name, by the way. I read this with interest, some very good points, well made. I’ve learnt over the years never to rely on just one Explanation anyway so I always test the water elsewhere and often ask kind madrelingua in our Italian Club if in doubt. Happy learning to you; -)

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Thank you for the kind words, and I wish you the same! :heart:

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