Inflammatory title, I know.  Haters try to keep a lid on it; you know where I stand.  I just had an idea for a fun game.  There are a lot of tests where we could pit people against machines, but this one aggrandizes me, so it is objectively the best way.

I wrote some flash fiction as part of monsterhearts, which got little attention at the time.  And fair, it’s written in two invented dialects, one for each character.  It occurred to me that if I couldn’t get humans to put in the effort to understand the story, LLMs would be perfect.

They performed admirably.  I’m guessing better than my average reader.  However, they did make mistakes.  Claude came in first place, Gemini second, Chat GPT last.  Respectable efforts, but they all misunderstood at least one important thing about the plot.  But how would you rank, at translating my dubious conlang?

This is a test of your linguistic skills.  How familiar are you with English dialects and their close cousins?  How deft are you at interpreting unfamiliar uses of spelling and grammar?  We all got some practice with that in lolcat days.  These are still English, after a fashion.  Read the story and give it a try.

A Villager Speaks:  “Shud ya desira ken hin fra yon, hinna Portinsmuth sonly ine or tuther – men fra woem, blake fra wise, rond fra thin – an most acrux? Folk fra Fesh.  Folk are a’ye an I, Fesh are a’yon beests adeep – amorfin and bespeckt wid scale an wesker.

“Wellasn’t ye kennit, ine feshmen set hes mine against God, crosst ine fra tuther to be folkwoem, so enamerd he upon harta ine folkwoem true.  Shud God despiset, so shud we, an sure we’ll do arpart thet God prevale.  Aymen.”

A Monster Speaks:  “State een base, slubbit and bubbit, form flu een den oot, born von deef and vor deef retorn.  But nine, seen I she – Vivian, aland and adeer, perfected een state as still.  Soght I state as still, form perfected, and a hand will hold as fingers abone and aflesh fare-firm.  Call you I Gosette Aland, or perish aneath the million ton.”

In order to play this game, it’s important that you don’t read each other’s replies.  To that end, I recommend turning your responses into white text on this white page, so they can only easily be read by highlighting them.

Here’s how to do it. (EDIT: i have no idea how to do it lol)  Copy the text below and paste it into your comment, filling out the form:

<span style=”color: white”>My translation of the Villager: Xxx xxxxx… My translation of the Monster: Xxxxx xxxx… Comments: The reasoning behind your translation, or anything you found noteworthy.</span>

NOTE:  When you copy-paste the code, delete the quotation marks and replace them with ones that you type.  For some reason copy-pasting out of the article converts the quotation marks to slanted ones that don’t work, the ones you type in the comment section are straight up and down, and do work.

Let’s see if this works.  I’m guessing that of my commenters Flex would have the best chance of beating the bots, maybe even while drunk.  If nobody plays, I guess that means LLMs are better than all humans at all things forever, the end.

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