ChatGPT as a linguistic informant. A comparison of human and AI-generated translations

In the past sixty years various research methods have been proposed to help the researcher to collect reliable data to which theoretical analyses can be applied. In this paper it is investigated if artificial intelligence (AI)-generated translations of selected excerpts from literary works by ChatGPT can help the researcher to gain more insight into a linguistic phenomenon, viz. the acceptability of preverbal bare plural nouns in Romance, which have been argued to be much less acceptable than bare nouns in Germanic. The machine translations are checked against the official translations by the professional human translators. Furthermore, the chatbot is queried about its choices. A quantitative and qualitative comparison reveals that the machine’s translations approach those by the human translators. However, while the chatbot shows some metalinguistic knowledge and may explain some of its choices, for explanations for which some more analytical knowledge is required, it fails. The paper concludes that the chatbot’s observational adequacy may, however, help the researcher to do research on specific linguistic phenomena for which data are difficult to obtain.