From what I’ve seen, clozemaster uses AI in two areas, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of it being used in other areas. I’ll just focus on the two I’ve seen and comment on them:
- Image generation. I haven’t used this feature, but lately I’ve been probing it around, and it is just god awful. It is such obvious slop. The images look absurd, are often just plain wrong, and moreover, it is not reasonable to expect to generate a good image in the first place for every sentence, because so many are way too abstract to make any sense.
- Explain feature. I have been using clozemaster to learn Croatian. When I first set out on this journey, the explain feature seemed amazing to me. It would explain things so thoroughly and break things down into an easy to understand manner. However, when I started picking up serious study material, and consulting with my Croatian native speaker family, I started noticing that the explain feature does not just make the occasional minor mistake, but my reliance on the explain feature was a long term hindrance to my ability to understand Croatian grammar. I still probe the feature around, and the better my Croatian becomes, the more disappointed with it I become.
As a bonus point, I want to take a moment to aknowledge just how god awful the voice synthesizer is. I could never hope to learn Croatian pronunciation with it, but that’s not even my main worry. The voice synthesizer is so obviously robotic, I doubt anyone with half a braincell would consider using it. However, the explain feature is where things get misleading in a manner that beginner and intermediate learners can’t necessarily pick up on. I think it is finally time to say goodbye to AI slop. This conversation has been had on the forum before in 2024, and usually the rebuttal has been to wait for AI to get better. It hasn’t, at least within the framework of clozemaster, and I am by no means asking for the devs to implement a better model, because that would drive the costs up even higher. I have a lifetime subscription to clozemaster, so this doesn’t impact me as much, but on the behalf of others using this app, I would like to ask to throw AI slop into the wastebin of history, and bring back the lifetime subscription. It would literally be a win-win. And to be perfectly honest, there are so many amazing human made grammar and other resources that go so well with my clozemaster journey, I think it would be better, more helpful, and more cost effective if the devs were to integrate those resources even more deeply into the app.
As a final nail in the coffin for me using AI to learn languages, I recently tried the best proprietary model of claude that my relatives have access to. It is a horrible Croatian teacher and makes the kind of mistakes that even a beginner won’t make.