掲示板 Forums - renshuu's stance on AI

(This has been mentioned before in the renshuu news, but it was requested that I post it here as well for a permanent place to see it.)

I originally made renshuu to help myself learn Japanese, with the ultimate goal of using the language to talk and interact with people.

Aside from all the technical, quality, and ethical issues of using AI (most of which I agree are serious problems), our core belief is that language learning should be focused around people and the ability to interact with other people during your learning journey.

renshuu does not use any AI (LLM) generated user-facing content, nor will it. This means no audio, artwork, or text made by AI.

All artwork is done by Saki (my wife, and partner in renshuu) or members of our learning community.

All audio is recorded by native speakers.

All text (lessons, sentences, etc.) is written by people.

All translations that are not taken from publicly available dictionaries such as jmdict are written and verified by members of our learning community.

If you ever feel that you see something written by AI (say, a user-submitted comment or a user-submitted image for a vocab word), just let us know so we can look into it!

Disclaimer: I am the only developer/programmer for renshuu. I've been writing code for 30 years, and love it, but I will occasionally use bits of code that I generate together with an LLM. Even though you cannot see most of the code, though, 99.99% of it is written using the keyboard in front of me, and that will continue to be the case!

Of course it's still the case. You should recognize the voice as the male voice that has done the audio for thousands of the sentences over the last few years.

Edit: I'll go ahead and note that the voice artist I use it fairly prolific in his work, and has what I'd call (in a good way) a someone stereotypical voice you often hear with certain characters in voiceovers/anime. It's sad but understandable that a voice like his would become so prevalent in AI recordings.

It would have seemed that way because up until now, those words had no audio (and so their listening mastery was at 0). When the audio comes in, there is suddenly some new ones to train up from zero.

The おばけ one *did* have a weird "blip" right in the middle - I neglected to catch it, but did remove it for now.