Instagram apologizes for inserting 'terrorist' into Palestinian bio translations

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

throwaway2203 wrote: post #48

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've been playing with it a bit... the other day I asked ChatGPT the name of a certain animal in Urdu and it with complete confidence threw the name of a fruit at me. That said ChatGPT is better at picking up dialect nuances. I can ask it to tell me how to say something in Egyptian Arabic, vs most translation tools will use Modern Standard.

Post by jrh3 » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 9:23 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #64

gotoeleven wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spe…

Post by matteoraso » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 9:27 PM UTC

zogrodea wrote: post #68

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.

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.…

Post by wutwutwat » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 9:38 PM UTC

elil17 wrote: post #3

This is the sort of thing that could cause people to lose friends or jobs. This is exactly the sort of thing we should be worried about with AI. I feel like machine translations like those on Instagram should come with a disclaimer (in bold, not fine print!).

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 9:40 PM UTC

pjerem wrote: post #26

f233f2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the average person doesn't generally know how technology works. I think the solution is not to limit the use of technology but to restrict the exposure of the average person to technology until they can prove that they know how it works (some sort of internet license, if you will)

tbf, with AI, even technologists doesn’t generally know how it works.