Read my post ‘Talking with a machine’ which is related.
AI cannot answer questions that are not available on social media. Since no one has said that most dyslexics are shut down /disengaged kids because of confusion due to the wrong teaching of sounds of consonants AI can’t come up with an answer. This is acceptable because AI can’t think.
However, Deepseek avoids answering questions about topics commonly censored by the Chinese government. This is understandable.
Here is something I wrote that has been avoided.
‘If the politicians can’t get all schools in Mainland China to eradicate Bopomofo and introduce strict Pinyin it is ok with me but do not come to my country and promote consonant sounds as taught under Bopomofo and claim it to be Hanyu Pinyin. This is what some teachers from Mainland China are doing on Face Book and influencing teachers and kids in Malaysia.
Malaysia successfully implemented Hanyu Pinyin in the 70’s and eradicated all forms of Bopomofo.’
The response I got was: ‘The server is busy. Please try again later.’
However, when I asked another question, I got a response.
Here is another question where the response was: ‘The server is busy. Please try again later.’
You (deepseek) said, ‘Include statistics or research findings that demonstrate the scale of the problem and the effectiveness of your solutions. For example, The percentage of children in China who struggle with reading due to incorrect Pinyin teaching.’
I am the only person to have said this. This is the same when I wrote incessantly that phonological awareness deficit is not the cause of dyslexia. So, where do I go for research reports on incorrect pinyin teaching?
The answer to my question above could have been:
i. There is no such research report.
ii. This is something new to us.
iii. We don’t know. Etc.
I am tempted to say this is another case of ‘Chinese face-saving’. But my friends will laugh and say what face-saving a machine has.
1 comment:
I found that LLMs (ChatGPT, Deep Seek, xAI, Gemini..) they all produce erroneous Pīnyīn, and very stubbornly so, always producing the same mistakes, no matter how much time and effort I put in the conversation. I conclude the same, that they do not think, cannot think, cannot learn, and merely produce rows of characters from their training data. Unfortunately, their training data is mostly wrong, because almost everyone on the internet is writing Pīnyīn wrong. It's a bit like 400 years ago with, for example, German and English, when everyone was writing ad-hoc, often spelling the same words differently even in the same sentence. However, we have rules for Pīnyīn that make it easy to write beautifully and in a way that the words can be looked up in a dictionary, and be understood by other readers. As an avid reader of John Taylor Gatto and the history of education, I can understand why most Chinese have difficulties thinking and reasoning about Pīnyīn. So, I think, first we educators with an open mind and free spirit need to light the dark. I'm glad to have found your blog today! For the longest time I've been thinking I'm alone in the dark. I will read on!
Post a Comment