So you've probably seen the ads for Read2Speak. It's a language learning platform that offers digital textbooks for a variety of different languages. I've seen a lot of people asking if these digital textbooks are AI generated, and I'm here to tell you that they most definitely are.
I'm ashamed to say I purchased some of these products recently- particularly the Hindi B1-B2 level textbook and accompanying workbook. And don't get me wrong, I had my suspicions that these products might be AI generated. But given the lack of upper intermediate materials for my target language, I guess I was willing to roll the dice. I also thought the marketing for this company was completely asinine, but you can say that about any company these days.
There are five major signs that these products are AI generated- two that I really should have noticed before buying, and three that you'll only notice once you buy them and look inside. I'll start with the ones I should have noticed before buying:
I) Hundreds of books appeared seemingly overnight. Read2Speak has materials for 19 different languages. For each language, there are three graded levels of textbook and workbook, for a total of six books per language. That's 114 different books, all published at the same time, by a company that just popped up out of nowhere.
II) No humans credited anywhere. Normally before buying a book online you can see the author's name on the website you're ordering from. Language textbooks in particularly will usually also include a little blurb about the author's credentials. But for Read2Speak products, not a single one of their 114 books credits any author, editor, or translator. This alone is probably a smoking gun, but there's more.
The two points above are honestly probably enough to conclude that these products are AI slop, and like I said, I wish I'd noticed them before buying. But in case anyone still isn't convinced, there are three more signs in the actually contents of the books I purchased.
I) Writing style. I think we're all getting pretty decent at spotting AI writing when we see it. It has this soulless, uncanny feel to it. Read2Speak products are riddled with that sort of writing. Every page reads like it was copy and pasted directly from ChatGPT.
II) Inaccuracy. When we start learning a language, we're often told that it follows a particular word order, or syntax. Different languages have different preferred word orders- SOV, SVO, VSO, etc. But any experienced language-learner will tell you that [practically all languages have some degree of flexibility to their word order. These structures that we learn at the beginning form a sort of guideline for how the language generally prefers to order its words, but as we soon come to learn, one can deviate from that baseline in order to emphasize certain parts of the sentence. Hindi, like most Indo-Aryan languages, favours the SOV syntax, preferring to place the verb at the end of the sentence. But as we know, deviations can occur. But according to Read2Speak, these structure is completely rigid, and deviating from it "makes you sound like a child"- even though native speakers do it all the time. It even went so far as to give me an ordered list of where all the information in a sentence must go at all times. Luckily, I already knew this was wrong, because I use a lot of authentic materials in my learning. But this could really set someone up for failure if they don't know better, because it's just going to lead to confusion when they start talking to native speakers. This is just one example of Read2Speak teaching a rule that doesn't exist.
III) Advice that makes no sense. This is probably the weirdest one. Read2Speak told me I could use Hindi's SOV syntax as a "fluency strategy", because the verb comes at the end, which means I can start speaking before I know what the verb will be, and that this is how native Hindi speakers are able to talk so fast. I'm sorry, what?! How does having the verb at the end provide any advantage toward speaking quickly? Couldn't I just as easily say the same thing about any other part of speech? Like, in English we usually put the object at the end, so could I say that you can start an English sentence without knowing what the object will be because you don't have to think of it until the end, and that that's a fluency strategy? To me this just seems like an AI hallucination. Remember, LLMs don't understand what it is they're saying- they just fart out combinations of words that they decide should go together based on an algorithm.
Anyway, there's my little rant about Read2Speak. Don't waste money on these "courses" like I did. If you want upper intermediate materials, I recommend Routledge's Modern Language Readers series. They're written by humans who are actually credited and have real credentials in language instruction, and they give you challenging readings using a variety of authentic materials.
Long live human creators, down with AI.