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[Il Palazzo]

Hey, man. I work in translations. Guess what all the machine translators have been training on without any credit or compensation. The AI simply catches up with other areas where intellectual property is the product of one's labour. For years I've been fretting that the industry is about to collapse any day now. But it keeps chugging along, seemingly at the same pace as before the AI. Even integrating some of the machine capabilities into the human translator's workflow.
Still, it's hard to make a solid argument that it'll stay that way.

[dragdeler]

Entirely subjective but I am convinced 8-10 years ago all the google services worked considerably better... translate would recognize languages, the search engine would deliver better results, the google maps UI was sooo much better...


So even if somebody built a proficient translating AI, I feel like the general public would have no access because they're too busy peddling paid search results, and juggling third party cookies these days.

[pisskop]

Google and other data-centric megacorps almost certainly do retain the best information and programs for their own use.

The ai that was in the news is just one example

[Great Order]

Entirely subjective but I am convinced 8-10 years ago all the google services worked considerably better... translate would recognize languages, the search engine would deliver better results, the google maps UI was sooo much better...


So even if somebody built a proficient translating AI, I feel like the general public would have no access because they're too busy peddling paid search results, and juggling third party cookies these days.

I can tell you that in my experience the search was better even a few years back.

Now Google keeps shitting out related search terms at best. Like it'll replace warm with burning. At worst it'll give you the opposite word, like replacing more with less (And I know it does that because I'll search up less and it'll highlight more in the result) or on occasion something utterly unrelated.

I don't know if this is Google being shit, or they're losing search power in a desperate attempt to modify the algorithm to counteract people who try to exploit it.

[Dunamisdeos]

Yeah mine has been doing that, returning bad results, or only ad-related results.

Part of me suspects the advent of a new and improved "Google Search Plus Subscription" or something. Now with the old search engine, but we deliberately dumbed down the free version to force you to spend money on using a search engine.

[Mathel]

I think they tried to make it more intelligent, but now it is trying to show off when it doesn't need to.

Replacing hot with burning is like that. Using an opposite is just plain stupid.

I just tested it. I searched for "smaller cat", and it highlited the words "small" and "smallest" in the results on the first page.

[Rolan7]

Reminder that you can force words or phrases to be precise (and also to appear at all) by putting them in quotation marks.

[delphonso]

The killer for me is when I look up product/serial numbers - they'll show me /similar numbers/... Mind-boggling. There's a meme going around about how devastating it is to add "reddit" to the end of every search so you actually get a result that isn't some AI-generated algorithm exploit. The state of search is bad.

AI tools, etc, will eventually replace jobs like translators and artists. It's impossible to predict when that will occur, though, and yes, as Il Palazzo pointed out, there will be a long period of integration with human operators before the switch can happen. Moreso, that last 5% perfection of these AI consistently takes far far longer than the rest. We're still not great with text-to-speech, even though we had that about 95% done 20 years ago.

As far as exploitation goes, yeah, that's going to happen. We already train the Google AIs by doing captchas - I'm certain there will need to be legal battles (likely lost, on the artists' side) about what data is fair game to train an AI on.

[heydude6]

Hold your horses on the idea of AI replacing translators, at least not good ones.

The simplest reason is because not all languages encode information equally. Some languages have way more tenses then others, other languages have untranslatable words with no foreign equivalent, and some languages have complicated etiquette rules that require more information than was originally encoded in the sentence. It's like trying to reverse engineer an original image from a JPEG. I wish I knew foreign languages well enough to give you an example, but unfortunately you're just going to have to trust some short Youtube videos that I've linked at the bottom.

And that's not even getting started on things like localization where it's genuinely necessary to change the text in order for the meaning to still make sense. Stuff like anagrams or poetry; where word play and rhythm and timing are all necessary components. At that point, it becomes an art more than a science. One that people have received awards for mastering.

If you could create a computer that could understand art enough to preserve it's meaning through multiple different translations, then I really don't think you're that far off from creating a GI.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAgp7nXdkLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGne-ZUZCg0
Challenge of translating Harry Potter

[King Zultan]

I don't think AI will be able to replace artists for quite awhile.


I've also noticed that search results are kind of shit now, not sure if it's the same reason Google sucks because I use Duckduckgo.

[hector13]

DDG isn’t the best, but at least they aren’t selling everything they know about you or using it to get you to buy shit.

[JoshuaFH]

Hold your horses on the idea of AI replacing translators, at least not good ones.

The simplest reason is because not all languages encode information equally. Some languages have way more tenses then others, other languages have untranslatable words with no foreign equivalent, and some languages have complicated etiquette rules that require more information than was originally encoded in the sentence. It's like trying to reverse engineer an original image from a JPEG. I wish I knew foreign languages well enough to give you an example, but unfortunately you're just going to have to trust some short Youtube videos that I've linked at the bottom.

And that's not even getting started on things like localization where it's genuinely necessary to change the text in order for the meaning to still make sense. Stuff like anagrams or poetry; where word play and rhythm and timing are all necessary components. At that point, it becomes an art more than a science. One that people have received awards for mastering.

If you could create a computer that could understand art enough to preserve it's meaning through multiple different translations, then I really don't think you're that far off from creating a GI.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAgp7nXdkLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGne-ZUZCg0
Challenge of translating Harry Potter

That is definitely a hurdle that machines will probably never be able to surmount. Localizing the meaning of something from one culture to another, even when they share the same or similar language, could only be done by someone that can gauge values and make judgments that you can't program into an AI. Like, if you say something like fanny, dinky, or randy, they all objectively both exist in American English and British English, but they'll mean something different to their respective speakers. So a machine will probably never be able to get over that last hurdle, because communicating with someone different from yourself doesn't just mean speaking their language, it also requires reaching out to get their perspective, and secure an understanding; something that obviously can't be automated no matter how sophisticated the AI.

[delphonso]

I would say 'don't bet against the future'. I think those things can be accomplished by training AI on people already having done that hundreds of thousands of times in all the translated works we have already.

In our lifetime? Maybe not, but I also wouldn't be surprised.

[TD1]

I would say 'don't bet against the future'. I think those things can be accomplished by training AI on people already having done that hundreds of thousands of times in all the translated works we have already.

In our lifetime? Maybe not, but I also wouldn't be surprised.

Pretty much. No computer was going to be sophisticated enough to beat a chess Grand Master.
Until one was.

[Great Order]

There is one specific spot in my room that smells of egg.

I've not had egg in my room for years.

And I mean it's a specific spot. Like a cubic meter of air that smells of egg. Nothing around it smells of egg. There's nothing in my room that smells of egg. Just this one specific spot.