"Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
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"Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
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Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
#2I agree with the take, but it's a temporary one, the sad reality is that we will be literally inferior soon, there will be a point where we will not trust human input without counter check by AI, we need to remember that we are kinda at the beginning of the AI era, in 5 to 10 years it's very unlikely that a human translator or software engineers will do better than the tooling we will have.
There is already a tipping point now in software engineering where we prefer to ask AI instead of humans because we believe accuracy will be better, see SO death as an example or just see the current state of online dev communities, it's getting deserted and between team members at work, we can also notice that people speak less and less.
Sad but I believe it.
Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
#3I agree with the take, but it's a temporary one, the sad reality is that we will be literally inferior soon, there will be a point where we will not trust human input without counter check by AI, we need to remember that we are kinda at the beginning of the AI era, in 5 to 10 years it's very unlikely that a human translator or software engineers will do better than the tooling we will have. There is already a tipping…
There’s no evidence it’s temporary or that AI is getting better. There was a big boost using LLMs to improve the quality of translation (after an often comical degradation using LLMs in the early days) but it’s completely plateaued. Coding is no different: LLMs aren’t any better, more tokens are being paid for, and the results are mediocre. People aren’t asking AI because it is better, they are asking AI because it’s fast and sycophant.
Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
#4What’s unfortunate is that the market that is willing to pay for high-quality human translation has shrunken considerably.
Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
#5I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.
Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
#6I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.
> often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.
As one of such people, I think there is a nuance to it. AI is great when you’re translating something to yourself. But when translating things for others, more caution and human judgement is needed. Espesially when translating instruction manuals, where bad wording could cause someone to injure themself.
Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
#7From the post:
> Ah, you can’t fire me, I’m self-employed!
I don't understand thinking like this. I think companies can certainly fire their contractors.
Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
#8I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.
There are translators and there are translators. Translating legal/business documents is a completely different thing from translating movies/books/games.
I can confidently say that LLMs do a better job than the average traditionally published fictions in my country, at least when the original works are in English. Every single time I watch a subbed movie there will be some lines noticeably wrong.
Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
#9I have no doubt that the writer is better at translating than AI, but I have to say that AI translation has gotten so good that I'm not sure how much longer translation work will be there, or rather it might end up being more about auditing.
For example, I just read the Lawrence Ellsworth translation of The Three Musketeers, which I very thoroughly enjoyed. I don't speak or read French, but from my understanding Ellsworth's translation is considered one of the more accurate translations of the work.
Out of curiosity, I sic'd Claude Fable on the original French version of The Three Musketeers and told it to translate accurately, but also try and keep the same jovial tone as the original and do not censor anything. After it was done, I didn't read the entire output, but I did compare a few individual chapters between the Ellsworth translation and the Fable translation.
They were honestly remarkably similar. As far as I could tell, nothing was substantially different from the Ellsworth translation and the Fable translation. I do think that the prose for the Ellsworth translation was a bit better, but the prose for the Fable one was actually perfectly readable. Again, I don't speak French so I cannot say for sure, but I do not believe that I would have gotten a significantly different experience had I read the Fable version instead of the Ellsworth version.
Now, it's possible (and likely) that this is somewhat self-fulfilling; Fable might have been trained using Ellsworth's translation and as such it's very directly able to crib from it; sadly since I do not speak any language outside of English, there's sort of a catch-22: the only way I can compare the accuracy of a translation is to compare against other translations, but if other translations exist then that will likely influence the results, and if a translation doesn't already exist then I have no way of auditing it.
I'm still going to continue reading through Ellsworth's translations for the subsequent stories simply because that feels more canonical, and as I said I do think the prose was a bit better.
Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
#10I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.
Not all translations are the same. Literary translations are often works of art in and of themselves, and automating them would be missing the point entirely, like automating homework or weightlifting at the gym. I don't really know what's the state of the art, but I do buy that, on the other hand, translating toaster manuals or generic copy could soon be automatic.