I was recently reminded how stupid ChatGPT is. I was translating some slang from Danish into English that I couldn’t really find a satisfactory solution for myself. ChatGPT full on hallucinate every single fucking prompt for these slang translations nad I ended up turning to one of my colleagues instead and ask him how he would translate the slang instead and he immediately came up with a very funny and accurate translation that fit the context so much better.

The hallucinations that chaptgpt came up with were not just incorrect, it also started going into made up explanations of the history of this slang word and how it is used normally in Danish speech and how it is a compliment. In reality the slangword was a word I had made up, that fit with the context I was using it for, is NOT a compliment and is very much not something people have a history of saying in normal Danish speech. It’s something that if you say it, most people will get what you mean, but it isn’t something people say.

But thank you chatgpt for your creative writing session. It was a very disappointing experience.

Generally whenever anything related to translations to Danish when using American tech has always been absolutely fucking terrible. Everything is, of course, seen through the lense of American contexts so when you’re Danish and using shit like Word, you always have to remember how the program thinks in English even if it’s supposedly installed in Danish.

Google docs are especially terrible at this.

Chat GPT is next level terrible if you move even an inch away from clinical, Danish. I can’t imagine how chatgpt would handle Southern Jut or any type of Danish dialect, really.

And when you’re me, trying to translate a story that uses dialects, slang, fictional slang, broken Danish and normal Danish, you just have to accept that chatgpt is largely useless for anything other than translating at basic bitch level.

In a way that makes me feel comforted. All that fancy tech and they still aren’t anywhere close to human.