Do we still need language teachers in the age of AI? Find out in Steve’s new video:
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My personal experience - AI can’t teach you casual talk even for a language with 10 million speakers, it only recognizes formal talk. It also can’t teach you a small language in any shape, way or form (think Inuktitut). It will claim x means y and be totally wrong. It can’t learn from you either, so even if you tell it x means z, it won’t remember it and improve.
We still very much need human language teachers…. at least for smaller languages. If the industry would allow users to genuinely train AI bots themselves on any subject they wanted, including say languages with only 500 speakers, and the training actually worked, then it would be a complete game-changer for language teaching. We are not there yet (I’ve tried training ChatGPT via their paid subscription…. it didn’t work).
I also speak a language with around 120 million native speakers. AI is fantastic at that and way better than me, who has studied the language for over 10 years, including in college and living in the country. That is just depressing to me because it feels like my effort was thrown out the window.
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