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Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

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Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#61

Post by OfSanguineFire »

alephnerd wrote: post #57
jncfhnb wrote: post #53

This is cut off for me. The article seems to be doing some wordplay. Is it actually translating that one phrase to the terrorist thing? Or is it translating a passage that includes that phrase and is semantically much closer to the terrorist thing?

It's translating "alhamdulillah" to "Terrorist". "Alhamdulillah" is Arabic for "Praise be to god" and (edit: to my ear at least) is used by Muslims (edit: by Arabic speakers more often) nowadays as an alternative to Allah u Akbar, Takbir, or Narai-e-Takbir because (edit: I think) those 3 terms have increasingly been co-opted. This is the equivalent of translating "Praise Jesus" to "I love god and hate abortions"

Alhamdulillah is not some recently coined alternative, it has been one of Arabic’s stock expressions for centuries and centuries. It is what Arabic-speaking people (and not just Muslims) have always said after something good happens. It is what Muslims customarily say as they get up from eating a meal, or oddly enough, after they sneeze.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#62

Post by mcpackieh »

permo-w wrote: post #17
elil17 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human translator translated "Praise god" as "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" I'm pretty sure they'd be fired immediately. In contrast, Instagram is not going to be taking down their machine translation tool.

not AI /= human

What did the translation, a dog?

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#63

Post by alephnerd »

O1111OOO wrote: post #38

Performed a quick search for ex-cia working at instagram and came up with a ton of hits related to general information about ex-government agents working in key positions at many tech firms. https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=ex+cia+working+at+instagram&... I'm not saying this translation error is related to that. I'm also not saying it isn't.

Ex-government agents from all governments work in tech companies that it's absolutely useless.

This just seems to be a dynamically trained MT algorithm that overtrained on charged discourse occurring over the past week. Also, I think FB uses their own MT algorithm instead of Google or Bing Translate for competitive and profit margin reasons.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#64

Post by adrian_b »

gotoeleven wrote: post #43
TeMPOraL wrote: post #41

On a tangent to the main point, I like the subtle acknowledgement of our new reality - or at least of the one of many sudden shifts in common software tooling: > Google Translate translates the phrase to “Praise be to God.” ChatGPT translates it to "Praise be to Allah" or "All praise is due to Allah." LLMs turned out to be pretty good at translating, and ChatGPT (especially GPT-4) went straight into competing toe-to-…

I like it when arabic phrases are changed to be more palatable to western know-nothings. Ask the guy saying "alhamdulillah" if he means Allah or if he means God.

That question is meaningless, because "Allah" is the translation into Arabic of the English word "God".

Neither of these two words is a name of a god, which normally does not matter, because both the Christians and the Muslims believe that there exists only one god, so it is not necessary to have a proper name for that god.

Obviously, whenever a Christian believer or a Muslim believer speaks about the "God", they speak about the only god they believe in, so it makes no sense to ask them which god they mean.

A non-believer may speak about the God of the Muslims and about the God of the Christians, to make clear the intended meaning, and the latter phrase might be translated into Arabic with words meaning "the Allah of the Christians".

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#65

Post by klyrs »

throwaway2203 wrote: post #52
jncfhnb wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which animal?

"wasp". IIRC it returned "shahtoot" which is a kind of berry. I just tried again and it said "shahbaz" which is a name or at best an adjective. The correct translation would be "bher" which Google Translate displays as the "alternative" translation.

To save somebody a search, mulberry. (and as is typical, a mulberry is a compound fruit; technically not a berry)

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#66

Post by alephnerd »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #61
alephnerd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's translating "alhamdulillah" to "Terrorist". "Alhamdulillah" is Arabic for "Praise be to god" and (edit: to my ear at least) is used by Muslims (edit: by Arabic speakers more often) nowadays as an alternative to Allah u Akbar, Takbir, or Narai-e-Takbir because (edit: I think) those 3 terms have increasingly been co-opted. This is the equivalent of translating "Praise Jesus" to "I love god and hate abortions"

Alhamdulillah is not some recently coined alternative, it has been one of Arabic’s stock expressions for centuries and centuries. It is what Arabic-speaking people (and not just Muslims) have always said after something good happens. It is what Muslims customarily say as they get up from eating a meal, or oddly enough, after they sneeze.

> is not some recently coined alternative, it has been one of Arabic’s stock expressions for centuries and centuries

Yep! But a lot of people nowadays will use Alhamdulillah in scenarios where you could just as well use "Allah u Akbar" now. There definitely was a linguistic shift over the past few decades. I also don't hear people saying "Inshallah" as much anymore.

> after they sneeze

"Bless you"

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#67

Post by slibhb »

elil17 wrote: post #16
permo-w wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this could easily have happened with non-AI translations

If a human translator translated "Praise god" as "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" I'm pretty sure they'd be fired immediately. In contrast, Instagram is not going to be taking down their machine translation tool.

What's wrong with that?

The AI tool did a bad job and they should try to make it better. But I don't understand the relevance of the comparison to a human translator. The alternative to translating this stuff via AI is not hiring humans, it's not translating it at all.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#68

Post by zogrodea »

elil17 wrote: post #16
permo-w wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this could easily have happened with non-AI translations

If a human translator translated "Praise god" as "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" I'm pretty sure they'd be fired immediately. In contrast, Instagram is not going to be taking down their machine translation tool.

I have a couple of things to say about this comment.

1. Instagram (and Facebook) are well known to suppress pro-Palestine voices (can pull up many examples but [0] should work because of that person being named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, clearly having some influence though I don't know her), so this seems like something consistent with what the company is known to do.

2. The Arabic words for "Praise God" have already been made fun of a lot and acquired different connotations by English speakers (like associating those words with a terrorist who is about to bomb some place) so, again, doesn't seem inconsistent. (It's known that machine learning on human language reproduces the humans' biases in the AI.)

[0] https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/celebrity-news/bella-hadi...

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#69

Post by bilalq »

alephnerd wrote: post #57
jncfhnb wrote: post #53

This is cut off for me. The article seems to be doing some wordplay. Is it actually translating that one phrase to the terrorist thing? Or is it translating a passage that includes that phrase and is semantically much closer to the terrorist thing?

It's translating "alhamdulillah" to "Terrorist". "Alhamdulillah" is Arabic for "Praise be to god" and (edit: to my ear at least) is used by Muslims (edit: by Arabic speakers more often) nowadays as an alternative to Allah u Akbar, Takbir, or Narai-e-Takbir because (edit: I think) those 3 terms have increasingly been co-opted. This is the equivalent of translating "Praise Jesus" to "I love god and hate abortions"

> "Alhamdulillah" [...] is used by Muslims nowadays as an alternative to Allah u Akbar, Takbir, or Narai-e-Takbir because those 3 terms have been co-opted by Jihadists.

This is not correct. Almost all of those phrases are commonly used in daily speech and prayers by Muslims globally. No group could possibly co-opt them. They are deeply rooted traditions.

Re: Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

#70

Post by alephnerd »

jncfhnb wrote: post #60
alephnerd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's translating "alhamdulillah" to "Terrorist". "Alhamdulillah" is Arabic for "Praise be to god" and (edit: to my ear at least) is used by Muslims (edit: by Arabic speakers more often) nowadays as an alternative to Allah u Akbar, Takbir, or Narai-e-Takbir because (edit: I think) those 3 terms have increasingly been co-opted. This is the equivalent of translating "Praise Jesus" to "I love god and hate abortions"

Is that the whole passage? It probably doesn’t matter. I’m just curious because the exact claim I see is > The "see translation" feature for user bios was auto-translating phrases that included "Palestinian" and “alhamdulillah” into "Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom." Which reads oddly

It seems that Meta probably dynamically trains their MT algo on near realtime discourse to better model linguistic shift. It seems like a smart move, but if you have extremely charged discourse like over the past week, it probably overtrains for inaccuracies.
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