It fits the "naive deplagiarization" explanation perfectly, however. Many of them are pre-LLM, when people had to plagiarize things the good old-fashioned way, and subsequently hide that fact via synonym replacement.
replyBefore LLMs, SEO content spammers used something called an "article spinner" which could rewrite lots of versions of the same article (which may or may not be someone else's article) by substituting synonyms, producing just enough variation to not get flagged as duplicate content by search engines. Some of the substitutions produced truly bizarre writing, but those pages were written for Googlebot to count the back links, not for human readers. This looks like what you'd get if you turned random substitutions down to a minimum to avoid plagiarism detection...
replyLLMs were not available in 2021, but "Google translate" is much older.
replySuch translations were not unusual.
Around 2017 to 2019 I used a lot "Google translate", because it saved time despite its flaws, but there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".
In each sentence I had to change at least a word or two, and many were hilarious. This was for translations between English and German. I assume that for other more distant languages the translations must have been much worse.
LLMs were absolutely available in 2021; the architecture is from 2017 and stuff like GPT-2 and BERT had been around for years. Conversational assistants, ie. ChatGPT, started in 2022.
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replyCould it just be neural translation? It existed since the mid 2010s.
replyThat's my suspicion. I used Grammerly in 2021 and those are the type of substitutions I could see
replyGoogle Translate has existed since way back then. I remember seeing hilarious posts about bizarre translations from Chinese and other languages in the 2010s.
replyI wonder if something similar is happening, except people are using AI detection tools and then substituting words.
replyNever heard of a content spinner?
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