That’s fair, and personally I’m not learning from an LLM, but this is the whole premise of the application. So this advice is basically not far from “stop developing this app” 
How would you advice to approach it instead? A fixed list of sentences and a couple of permutations of translations, akin to duolingo or bunpro but with free-form input? That’s a mountain of expensive human work for a fraction of coverage.
If the premise of the application is providing potentially wrong sentences to its users, I personally don’t think it should exist. That’s not to say an app can’t have any errors (there’s a bug report button in bunpro for a reason), but it’s not by design and it’s much more likely to be wrong if a computer hallucinates.
That said, if the idea is to have LLM producing sentences and their translations, here’s what I would do:
I believe this would greatly mitigate the dangers of having incorrect computer-generated content.
This is a great concept and project, very helpful, and a great way to put studies into practice. I’m glad I was able to create an account during beta testing.
I wouldn’t pay any attention to anyone who doesn’t complement their studies with several tools and resources, with anything that adds to their progress and motivation. That being said, your initiave is absolutely awesome and definitely worthwhile using. Thank you
That’s fair. I’ll try to formulate my own thinking about it though I’m also struggling with understanding how I feel about all this. Let’s say you are currently learning Japanese. Your roommate and best friend is a pretty good Japanese speaker as a second language, but not a native speaker (let’s say their Japanese is about the same level as my English). They definitely make mistakes and you can’t fully trust their advice, but they are available to you almost all the time. You also have much more reliable sources (e.g., a Japanese teacher on italki, or your Japanese coworker) but your access to them is much more limited (e.g. you have a lesson with them once a week, or you only see them at work and feel much less comfortable asking them for advice about the language).
Would you avoid speaking Japanese with your roommate because they might give you the wrong advice? Or will you prefer to speak Japanese with them during the day to practice, since they are fully available and know Japanese pretty well, but know that you shouldn’t rely on them exclusively?
I think for me my approach to using LLM with my language studies is like getting advice from this friend/roommate. I know I can’t fully trust them, but I can still get some practice and useful information from them as long as I take it into account.
The difference is that your roommate can tell you when they don’t know something, and you can see them struggling to come up with sentences, so you know when they’re not completely sure.
LLMs hallucinate as easily as they provide correct answers, and they don’t know the difference (LLMs don’t have the concept of “knowing”). Even worse, they are often confidently wrong and you will not find out unless you look it up or you already know the answer. Even if they are correct, they can be “convinced” that they are wrong and change their answer.
They are just statistical models. Duolingo was mentioned as an example earlier ITT. Well, many duolingo users are not satisfied exactly because of the issues I’m listing:
