About ChatGPT
As you can see from the text of the articles we published this month, we have stopped asking ChatGPT to proofread the text.
This is because the quality of the text was inconsistent and we ended up having to double and triple check the text, which increased the time and effort involved.
Nevertheless, I still have high hopes for ChatGPT, as I occasionally see “hilariously vivid proofreading”. However, the more readable the text is, the more my personality disappears. For better or worse, this site and my writing are characterized by slow and rambling sentences. I wondered what would be left if I were to eliminate that aspect of my writing, and I began to think about the raison d’être of the site.
In the early 21st century, when the Internet was still in its infancy, information such as this site’s would have been valuable. However, in the 2020s, information is all over the Internet.
What is the raison d’etre of this site, then, is the autobiography and language of “Okaden,” who has been writing on this site for a quarter of a century. I reminded myself that I should not spoil the use of language.
At the very least, I think it would be useless unless AI can read all the sentences on awaremi-tai.com and generate sentences after learning about Okaden’s language and tastes…that’s my current conclusion. This is the flip side of the fact that the text on this site does not have much informational value, and my personality is what is valuable.
However, I do use ChatGPT for different purposes than proofreading.
Not only in writing, but in anything else, the very first time I start to work on a text is tedious. In order to solve the tediousness, you can ask the client, “I want to write a text about ** for my blog, so please make a draft. I’ll list the conditions for writing the text below,” I tell ChatGPT, and they make a draft of about 800 words.
Naturally, the draft does not contain much of what I really wanted to write. So, based on the draft, I rewrite it drastically. I would use only the sentence structure and completely change the content.
In the end, it’s the same as me writing the text, but it’s a big improvement to get rid of the feeling that writing is a hassle, even if only a little.
The article I wrote about Rokkatei was conceived by ChatGPT, who came up with the original idea for the text. The beginning of the sentence was written in a very un-Okaden style, and some people might have thought, “Huh?” However, after that, it returned to the usual style. But after that, it went back to the usual style. In other words, I rewrote the whole thing.
Ideally, I would like the AI to generate the outline of a full-length travelogue like “Drunken Travelogue. It would be so much easier to work on the book afterwards if I could see the photos at a glance, have a rough text attached to each photo, and have the text automatically transcribed to the editing screen. However, this technology is not yet available.
At this point, it doesn’t matter if the text for the photos is a little outdated. I just have to be motivated to write. I just have to be motivated to write. In addition, ChatGPT should provide me with a rough draft as a guideline to prevent my thoughts from diverging as I write.
I will continue this kind of technical trial and error because it is fun.
Writing for English
https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/671191
This article was interesting. It is about the difference in the sense of laughter caused by the difference in grammar between English and Japanese.
Recently, I have been working on translating Japanese into English every day, although I leave it to machine translation. I often find myself thinking, “Oh, that expression doesn’t translate well into English. I also try to use plain Japanese, assuming that it will be translated into English by the machine.
When I am aware that my Japanese will be translated into English, my writing inevitably atrophies. Almost all of the sentences published in May 2023 are more subdued in expression than before because of slang and onomatopoeia. This is because the heavy use of slang and onomatopoeia makes it very difficult to translate into English.
Machine translation does not mean that you can just say, “Translate this whole page into English,” and it will translate it in no time. The machine translator reads the text line by line into the translation software, translates it, proofreads it to make sure it is consistent with English, and then inserts it into the article. This is an enormous amount of time and effort.
This English proofreading service is very helpful. I am often impressed by the way native speakers express themselves differently. For example, the word “shop” is corrected to “store” or “at” is corrected to “by”.
I think it would be more useful for students to use such services from their school days to improve their English. Students today are blessed. On the other hand, students who are busy with their homework may only use these useful tools to do their homework in a short time. While they can be used to deepen knowledge, they can also be used to cheat, which makes them difficult to use.
In the end, it all comes down to the student’s sense of purpose and motivation. In the future, parents should encourage their children to find meaning in their own studies and to study voluntarily, instead of nagging them to “study anyway.
In fact, if parents fail to motivate their children to study, they may just end up becoming idiots. After all, there are plenty of ways to cheat and plenty of ephemeral entertainment on the Internet.
(2023.06.01)
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