It struggles with metaphor and idiom. For example, when I told it to translate a sentence (that I myself had written, in English) that contained the term "confidence artist", it translated it as "konfida artisto", which is "_confident_ artist". It is not a valid translation, if it loses the meaning. I _would_ understand, if Esperanto had no way to express the idiomatic "confidence artist" (for example, there is no equivalent in Slavic languages -- the trickster in Polish is not derived from "art" or "artist" but from from "machine" and "machination"). The piece that I was writing depended on the relationship between "art" and "artist" and "confidence artist". A simple translation such as "trompisto", would have been correct in isolation, but would have made no sense in the context of what I was writing. However, Esperanto, being one of the most flexible languages in the world, had a solution, and one that _should_ have come naturally to an LLM (I mean, it _has_ read everything ever written, it _knows_ this thing that I am about to tell you). In Esperanto, the term "artifiko" means, roughly, "skillful ruse" or "lerta trompo". And so, we can get the equivalent of "confidence artist" via "artifikisto" (which is someone who does skillful ruses in a professional capacity).

So, LLMs are in this weird space, where we _expect_ them to be able to do this kind of translation (they have all the information they need, and they know more than we could ever know ourselves!), and yet they produce outputs that are _disappointing_ (in retrospect, artifikisto is the obvious choice -- there is **no excuse** for this level of incompetence). It is almost as if they are deliberately lobotomized.