I spend a lot of time for employment reasons using Google Translate, a very well-made LLM with limited functions. One of the things it can’t do right is to assign gender in translating from Japanese to English, because Japanese doesn’t use gendered pronouns. It guesses pretty well inside a sentence, like if somebody is identified as a “female musician” it will use “she” in that sentence, and I think it kind of succeeds with a source like Wikipedia by assuming that most articles are about males because they don’t get marked wrong for the assumption, for the obvious sexist reasons (most articles really are about males). But it doesn’t memorize that this particular person, subject of the article, is a female, and switches genders randomly in the course of telling the story. It may learn generalities, but it doesn’t learn anything in this immediate local way.

Oct 22
at
2:38 AM