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

They're right until they're not.

"Don't think of an elephant"

> There is an interesting third group emerging: People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output.

Ah yes, the known unknowns.

The discussion reminds me of a talk Zizek gave in which he discusses the speech Rumsfeld gave regarding the evidence Iraq supplying weapons to terrorist[0].

Zezik argues the unknown knowns are far more interesting (and the reason why USA was losing in Iraq). While Rumsfeld focused on the unknown unknowns.

I've noticed that domain experts who implicitly know the the known unknowns of their field distrust LLMs because they can identify their shortcomings. Those subtle mistakes LLMs make. I argue this is why domain experts using LLMs get such a boost. They can identify and avoid pitfalls sometimes before they happen. But in other fields the same people are in awe of LLM capabilities precisely because the known unknowns are a mystery.

The Unknown Unknowns of LLMs are the IMO the most interesting. The so called emergent capabilities of the technology. The use of LLMs in others fields such as biology, eg in protein language models, is really cool.

Everyone focuses on replacement of people workers when I think opening new fields of work for humans should be the goal of LLMs by leveraging the tech to discover.

The other interesting caregory is unknown knows. But that's another topic for another time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns

I tried this with the original comment in the thread. Guaranteed to not be in the corpus, references a few terms that also wouldn't be in the corpus (Claude Fable), and long enough to be more than a sentence or two while short enough to compare in a discussion like this.

I did this with entirely local models I have sitting around on my laptop. Minimax M2.7 at a 3 bit quant with 8 bit quantized KV cache for English -> French, Gemma 4 31B QAT (4 bit quant) MTP for French -> English.

It's perfectly readable, but there are a few places where the phrasing is a bit more awkward after the double translation ("auditing" to "revision" in particular is a bit off). Gemma did comment on not knowing what Claude Fable was in its thought process: "The author compares Ellsworth's translation with one produced by "Claude Fable" (likely a misspelling of "Claude" or a specific version of Claude)."

Here's the double translation:

"I have no doubt that a writer is better at translating than AI, but I must say that AI translation has become so good that I'm not sure how much longer the profession of translation will exist—or rather, it may become more a matter of revision.

"For example, I just read Lawrence Ellsworth's translation of The Three Musketeers, which I enjoyed immensely. I neither speak nor read French, but from what I understand, Ellsworth's translation is considered one of the most faithful translations of the work.

"Out of curiosity, I asked Claude Fable to translate the original French version of The Three Musketeers; I asked it to translate faithfully, but also to try to maintain the same playful tone as the original and to censor nothing.

"Once it was finished, I didn't read the entire result, but I compared a few individual chapters between Ellsworth's translation and Fable's.

"They were honestly remarkably similar. As far as I can tell, nothing was substantially different between Ellsworth's translation and Fable's. I think the prose in Ellsworth's translation was slightly better, but Fable's was actually perfectly readable. Again, I don't speak French, so I can't say for certain, but I don't believe I would have had a significantly different experience if I had read Fable's version instead of Ellsworth's.

"It is possible (and probable) that this is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy; Fable may have been trained using Ellsworth's translation and can therefore draw directly from it. Unfortunately, since I don't speak any language other than English, there is a sort of vicious circle: the only way to compare the fidelity of a translation is to compare it to other translations, but if other translations already exist, that will likely influence the results, and if a translation doesn't exist yet, I have no way of verifying it.

"I am going to continue reading Ellsworth's translations for the following stories simply because it feels more canonical to me, and as I said, I think the prose was slightly better."

I had transliterated lyrics of a song * with stanzas in Urdu , Braj Basha, Persian and Arabic , that I wanted to understand better ..

Gemini did a pretty good job of translating this to English .

Sure a professional human translator would have done a more nuanced job if I was willing to invest the money and time . But ...

* tajdar e haram originally by Payam Saihalwi, later versions by the Sabri Brothers and recently by Asif Aslam