Users who translate texts from English or another language into German and are not native speakers of the target language should be cautious when using services such as DeepL and ChatGPT. 1. For both, the default setting is not the standard language, as one might assume, but a special language that is rejected by the majority of the language community and does not follow the official rules. These are determined for all German-speaking countries by the Rechtschreibrat. DeepL and ChatGPT follow their own rules or the inconsistent ideas of activists. The German language generated by DeepL and ChatGPT is often dysfunctional, incorrect, and imprecise. Formal inaccuracies can lead to inaccuracies in content. 2. If AI systems do not know words, they may simply replace them with completely different ones. In one test, DeepL translated “Animal-Computer Interaction” as “Mensch-Computer-Interaktion” (“Human-Computer Interaction”). This made the text factually incorrect. 3. Overall, especially with ChatGPT, English language structures are transferred to German. This results in unnatural-sounding lists, unlinked compounds (“Deep Learning Modelle” or “Deep Learning-Modelle” instead of “Deep-Learning-Modelle”), and unnecessary or incorrect hyphens (“nicht-amtliche Regeln” instead of “nichtamtliche Regeln”).
AI Systems Harm the German Language
