This page in my kid’s book from school to learn how to read.

LazaroFilm@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 686 points –
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Grammar aside, it's an odd choice to fill up half the page with 747s if you want to showcase the variety of commercial passenger airplanes.

I'm more annoyed at the lack of anything prop.

Not everything is a international long haul.

It genuinely took me a while to see what was wrong with it, my brain was autocorrecting it

Many modern theories in cognitive science posit that the brain's objective is to be a kind of "prediction machine" to predict the incoming stream of sensory information from the top down, as well as processing it from the bottom up. This is sometimes referred to through the aphorism "perception is controlled hallucination".

So human thought is … text prediction?

In a sense... yes! Although of course it's thought to be across many modalities and time-scales, and not just text. Also a crucial piece of the picture is the Bayesian aspect - which also involves estimating one's uncertainty over predictions. Further info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

It's also important to note the recent trends towards so-called "Embodied" and "4E cognition", which emphasize the importance of being situated in a body, in an environment, with control over actions, as essential to explaining the nature of mental phenomena.

But yeah, it's very exciting how in recent years we've begun to tap into the power of these kinds of self-supervised learning objectives for practical applications like Word2Vec and Large Language/Multimodal Models.

We can have robots with bodies that talk and form relationships with people now. Not deep intimate relationships, but simple things like maintaining conversations with people. You wouldn’t need much more software on top of the LLM to make a really functional person.

I have to disagree about that last sentence. Augmenting LLMs to have any remotely person-like attributes is far from trivial.

The current thought in the field about this centers around so-called "Objective Driven AI":

in which strategies are proposed to decouple the AI's internal "world model" from its language capabilities, to facilitate hierarchical planning and mitigate hallucination.

The latter half of this talk by Yann LeCun addresses this topic too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd0JmT6rYcI

It's very much an emerging and open-ended field with more questions than answers.

Pterty mcuh, as lnog as the frist and lsat ltteres are in the crrecot palecs.

Even after reading your comment, it took me three more tries to see it! Wild.

See, I thought it was mildly infuriating because the images aren’t “many types of airplanes”, they’re only a few types of airplanes repeated at different sizes or different angles.

My brain autocorrected this for me, and I was confused why you were posting it at first.

This reminds me, there is a thing that the human mind can read horribly spelled words — as long as the general idea of it is the same (most of the time the end and beginning). I would try to find an example, but it’s late and my ability to form proper search queries os diminished.

Just invret two letters in a wrod that are not the first or the last. You will read just fine and prboably not even notice. Like this cmoment you just read

Prboably got me, didn't notice at all until re-reading. The rest I read just fine but easily noticed.

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Disregarding the bad grammar, the picture shows a terrible variety of airplanes. They're all some sort of commercial passenger jet.

It's like saying, "there's so many kinds of motorcycles!" while showing only various Harleys. Let's just ignore the dirt bikes, sport bikes, and everything in between.

What's wrong? They are many different kinds of airplanes. Why are they airplanes and not people, though?

Using "they" when you haven't yet established the group you are referring to in context feels weird and kinda wrong, especially if it's about a group of inanimate objects. It really looks like the word should have been "there", but they just mistyped and then didn't catch the error in the editing process or didn't bother to correct it.

That's what I think is wrong here. I'm not 100% sure that this grammatically wrong, but it sure feels like it. Might depend on what the page before this one said.

It’s in a book for 5 years old to learn to read. It’s supposed to be simple words in simple sentences. This is not it.

This is the only post in the entire thread attempting to parse the grammar.

It feels wrong because as you pointed out, as text, the pronoun "they" has no antecedent. Who are they?

But there is a picture, too. That's them!

It's not just type, it's typography. You have to analyze the grammar of something like one page of a picture book or a movie poster or advert in its context.

Is the issue that all the plains are basically the same kind of wide and narrow-body passenger jets? Like there is hardly any variety in the images?

the issue is with the text.

it says "they are .." instead of "there are ..."

I had to look a second time. My brain just auto-corrected that.

holy crap. I must have read it 3-4 times, STILL found nothing wrong, so I went to the comments. It took this comment train for me to see it, meaning you had to tell me literally what it was.

Human brains are so neat sometimes.

Also airplanes instead of aeroplanes

(Which is correct so there's nothing wrong with that)

The issue is on both pages. Lack of knowledge of English on one, and lazy copy/pasta of similar airplanes on the other.

This ladies and gentlemen is an example of people using ai to make kid books. It's a big thing right now and easy money but could have consequence if kids start reading these at a young age.

Don't try to redirect stupidity from people to computers. We're more than capable of doing stupid things without the help of our AI overlords.

No. AI wouldn't mess up like that. It could spew other kinds of shit, but with excellent syntax. It's far more likely for humans to make mistakes like that.

This ladies and gentlemen is an example of people using ai to make kid books. It's a big thing right now and easy money but could have consequence if kids start reading these they at a young age.

FTFY

The good thing is: This type of book is read by parents to their 1-3 year old kids. You show the pictures and can filter weird sentences. This is not a book a 9 year old is going to read 😉

TIL that aeroplane is commonwealth english.

Brought to you by the people who spell jail as gaol

...no. Non-US English speakers absolutely do not say gaol instead of jail lmao and haven't for a loooooong time.

How do you know we're not secretly saying "gaol" but you're hearing it as "jail"?

downvotes of those that don't know that's actually a word.

It's an archaic word that pretty much fell out of usage in the 1800s. People don't say it. It's a word in very much the same way forsooth or something is.

That's why I downvoted.

Fucksake man, can you genuinely not tell when someone is poking fun at you? Are you one of these types that need the /s, like the seppos do? 😂

They were not being sarcastic.

This is a common misconception from Americans who presumably just read some 300 year old poem or book in their English literature lessons and assume everybody still writes like that.

They were definitely being tongue in cheek. No need to get your skidmarked knickers in a twist over a flippant comment.

Might want to work on your reading comprehension old chap

They are so many good kind of AI written books nowdays

Funny enough, I bet an Ai would not make that mistake.

Just like a human it really depends on what you feed your AI as training data.

Funny that as a non-native I’m less likely to make such a mistake than natives. At some point I had to learn the basics or something. Not that I don’t make mistakes

Same here I’m French native. The there their they’re thing doesn’t affect me.

I've always been a native English speaker, but my first 11 years of education weren't in the U.S. I also don't have an issue with: their, there, and they're.

Affect and effect were tough for me, though. I still have to think about it for a moment

And slightly off topic, I still can't tell the difference between pansexual and bisexual. Each time I feel like I have a decent internal definition someone comes along to inform me that I've got it wrong

Affect: action impacts you Effect: your action has an impact Bisexual: you like boys and girls Pansexual: you like boys, girls, boys that are girls, girls that are boys, people that identify as themselves…

There are many kinds...

They are is incorrect, and the word "so" is superfluous.

Spoken like a true Grammarly AI tool for all those extra words.

They're practically useless if you're going for nice prose and emphasis...

There are many kinds of airplanes!

There are sooooooo~ many kinds of airplanes! 🛬🛫 🛩️✈️

That reminds me, why do so many people confuse "they're", "their" and "there"?

The same reason people confuse your, you're, yore and yaw I guess.

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Because their committed to the bit that the only thing they learned in school is that "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."

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They are. What's the problem?

Like honestly, it's a simple present tense sentence, talking about those airplanes right next to it. They are so many kinds!

I guess the problem is that, while technically accurate English, it's a pretty non-standard usage. One sees a page full of a variety of planes and it's expected that the following text will make a general statement on planes as an idea: There are so many kinds of planes!

To refer to a group as the book does, it's just kind of clunky and awkward, and on top of that so many kinds is, in my experience, just an unusual adjective form. Teaching children how to read isn't just about learning how to sound out words: it's also about how to suss out their meaning, and a child at this reading level may have a hard time understanding the more abstract grammatical form that this book decided to take.

I guess there's 2 things. One is people being picky about 'They are' vs. 'There are' and the second is that they've probably not shown a very wide variety

My subconscious autocorrected that the first time I read it. It was only after reading your comment and going back to look again that I realized they had not written "There are".

I see it. "There are" and "they are" are different sentences with slightly different meanings. Writing this way is correct and I think you'll find it's common in older children's books and even adult books. Tolkien wrote often in this way that sounds clunky to the modern ear. I read a lot of older writing so to me it sounds more familiar and correct even.

What's wrong with it?

"They" instead of "their."

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When Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott join forces to create the new learning plan...

I don't get it.

"They [sic] are..."

My brain just filled it in, I had to read the comments to notice.

That's literally just civilian airliners. Only one type of plane

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Depending on context, this might not be wrong. It could be part of an "it is an airplane" -> "they are a few airplanes" -> "they are so many airplanes!" progression.

Is it?

Previous page is:

Sometimes airplanes go round and round and upside down.

So sadly, no.

Yeah, that's broken then. You at the very least need to have addressed which airplanes are being discussed before pulling out a pronoun.

Piece of shit book.

And that the book kids have to read from school to learn English. 🤦

Shortstop's the best position they is.

Draw some Trade Center Towers on the page with the text and everytime you pass the page you can have your own 9/11