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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?"

#81

Post by mjmsmith »

tombert wrote: post #9

I 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 Ells…

An interesting counter-example: https://xcancel.com/ValerioCapraro/status/206506665753442336...

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#82

Post by duffycommaryan »

xigoi wrote: post #6
mapmeld wrote: post #5

I 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.

Language is incredibly complex. I remember a TikTok from a bilingual English-Korean speaker comparing the English subtitles from a Squid Game scene to what was actually being said by the characters. The nuance and info density lost in translation made the subtitles feel completely remedial. Americans were basically watching a different show altogether.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#83

Post by duffycommaryan »

qsort wrote: post #10
mapmeld wrote: post #5

I 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.

When it's one one-hundredth the cost, "good enough" is generally good enough.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#84

Post by layer8 »

kevincox wrote: post #63
layer8 wrote: post #4

What’s unfortunate is that the market that is willing to pay for high-quality human translation has shrunken considerably.

Is it that unfortunate? Tasks that don't require high-quality translation now don't need human labor. We should be celebrating. The sad part is that we haven't figured out how to distribute our resources fairly to these people even thought their services aren't required as often. Instead we just take their wages and give them to the top 0.1%

It’s unfortunate because we are seeing more poor translations in all domains, and users suffer from it. It’s part of a general enshittification of things. There are few contexts where low-quality translations don’t constitute a degradation of user experience.

Just one amusing example I saw recently: On the Amazon website, a submit button labeled “Go” in English was translated to something which when translated back would be “Walking”. That’s the kind of thing that would be exceedingly unlikely to happen with a human translator.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#85

Post by layer8 »

mjmsmith wrote: post #81
tombert wrote: post #9

I 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 Ells…

An interesting counter-example: https://xcancel.com/ValerioCapraro/status/206506665753442336...

I wonder if “Just 3 words: you’re not alone” would have been acceptable. :)

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#86

Post by pixel_popping »

rootusrootus wrote: post #64
pixel_popping wrote: post #2

I 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…

> we will be literally inferior soon This plague of misanthropic doom is itself pretty depressing. Why do so many people think LLMs are in any way on a path to compete with human brains? Why do you think so little of yourself? The brain is magnificent and complex in ways that we are unable to decipher anytime soon, and it does way more than an LLM. Way, way more.

I don't talk specifically about LLMs but AI in general, it's an important distinction because tooling is currently what make models useful and more performant.

When I say we, I mean the general population really. There0-'ll always be the super bright ones, sure, but we gotta be realistic here. Most people already struggle to make any meaningful contribution because it's so hard to compete, and that gap is just gonna get bigger and bigger.

I agree the brain is pretty magnificent, but when it comes to stuff like language, figuring out if an idea actually works, building the next LLM, or running business stuff, it's pretty obvious we'll be inferior. AI can already innovate and come up with new things way faster than any human could, so at some point (soon) => the majority of contributions are just gonna come from AI, not from us.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#87

Post by esafak »

This is just about the worst career you could be in right now. Of course people are just going to upload it to ChatGPT. Processing text is its forte.

This person is in the first stage of grief (denial); artists are several stages ahead. Most customers are not going to care about the difference in translation quality unless it's in a regulated sector.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#88

Post by card_zero »

tombert wrote: post #58
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This isn’t a great test, because Claude alm…

Read the last two paragraphs :)

They say "yes, I admit it, this is all invalid".

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#89

Post by PaulRobinson »

xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

I was saying something like this a few years ago when people were getting first excited about ChatGPT. The gap has narrowed, but not by as much as people think.

AI produces output that is very convincing to a non-expert, and (dangerously), it's so good at looking like an expert, they might believe that it is an expert. But the moment you ask someone to use it for something they're an expert in themselves, the holes appear wide, consistent & obvious.

My favourite moment of seeing this in action was watching AI-worrier TV host/comedian Bill Maher. He has spent years talking about the dangers of AI taking everyone's jobs, destroying civilisation, ruining the economy, starting wars, "it's just getting better and better all the time", and so on. But one night he let slip a tell. "It's no good at writing jokes. Not yet, anyway". There you go, Bill... connect those dots...

There is real utility in it being a tool to help experts apply their expertise, as in this story where it speeds up some tasks to help the translator do part of the work, enhance their expertise, allow them to be more productive.

It's a better screwdriver, a better hammer, in the hands of somebody who knows what needs a screwdriver or a hammer. It doesn't replace them. It can't replace them. It's a tool that enhances the human, not an alternative.

I don't understand why this is not widely understood yet, but I'm sure it will in due course.

And I don't expect this to change. Even if the latest model scores 100% on every benchmark, all that really tells us is that it's now more productive/efficient than it was before at helping experts do that work, not that it can replace everyone in that category of work.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#90

Post by baby_souffle »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #76
xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

Well said. Everyone agrees AI can't do their job, so it ends up doing everyone else's. I'm not sure how to formulate it yet but it seems there is some Peter Principle/Gell-Mann Effect corollary that is AI-related we can say here. Perhaps: "AI rises to the level of its users' incompetence." Or: "Confidence in AI output is inversely proportional to one's ability to verify it"

> Confidence in AI output is inversely proportional to one's ability to verify it

I like this / generally agree. The only wrinkle is that - for some tasks - the verification _is_ "run the script, see if it worked, don't care how... just that it did" which is distinctly different from "not only did it do it correctly, it did so in the most direct and performant way possible".

For a _lot_ of what I use LLMs to build, the former is all I need.

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