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AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

technologyreview.com

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Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#21

Post by Mars008 »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #6

> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with trans…

> who use AI translator or worst like Google translate

It's the same. Google translate uses trained AI models.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#22

Post by fooker »

AlienRobot wrote: post #9
fooker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yes, half of my entire political ideology is based on posts written by 12 year olds on the Internet. The other half is based on posts written by dogs[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#23

Post by arthurjj »

foxglacier wrote: post #2

If nobody's reading them and nobody's writing them, then perhaps it doesn't matter. We could let Wikipedia-Greenlandic persist as its own evolved language that forks from the original. > potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them. OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use whatever languages are appropriate to them…

This was my take from the article also. These languages are clearly dying and not many people speak them as their primary language so the human suffering is minimal. Which means keeping them around is a past time that some people happen to enjoy (unless there is a Saphir-Whorf hypothesis I'm missing)

But the sentence `well-meaning Wikipedians who think that by creating articles in minority languages they are in some way “helping” those communities` clearly shows the author hasn't really considered the issue.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#24

Post by TZubiri »

simonw wrote: post #4

I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... > an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing Wikipedia at 12 and naively fa…

The Cebuano wiki is a similar case, not spoken often, but it was a personal project of an editor that was mad at political articles and started making animal articles in the Cebuano wiki.

The solution is to differentiate and tag inputs and outputs, such that outputs can't be fed as inputs recursively. Funnily enough, wikipedia's sourcing policy does this perfectly, not only are sources the input and page content is just an output, but page content is a tertiary source, and sources by policy should be secondary (and sometimes primary) sources, so the system is even protected against cross tertiary source pollution (say an encyclopedia feeding off wikipedia and viceversa).

It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail to cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur, see [[citogenesis]]

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#25

Post by aspenmayer »

fooker wrote: post #22
AlienRobot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, half of my entire political ideology is based on posts written by 12 year olds on the Internet. The other half is based on posts written by dogs[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.

> Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.

Please consider users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, as your nonstandard usage of nonstandard characters makes parsing your comment difficult if not impossible. Not a slight or a correction, as I am a fan of Zalgo text myself, but after being informed by others about how inscrutable it can be to the differently abled, I have reconsidered using it.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#26

Post by fooker »

aspenmayer wrote: post #25
fooker wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.

> Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots. Please consider users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, as your nonstandard usage of nonstandard characters makes parsing your comment difficult if not impossible. Not a slight or a correction, as I am a fan of Zalgo text myself, but after being informed by others about how inscrutable it can be to the differently abled, I have reconsidered usi…

Didn't realize that, thanks!

I wonder if the future of screen reading applications is bypassing these issues + avoiding parsing weird websites by just doing AI driven OCR.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#27

Post by aspenmayer »

fooker wrote: post #26
aspenmayer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots. Please consider users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, as your nonstandard usage of nonstandard characters makes parsing your comment difficult if not impossible. Not a slight or a correction, as I am a fan of Zalgo text myself, but after being informed by others about how inscrutable it can be to the differently abled, I have reconsidered usi…

Didn't realize that, thanks! I wonder if the future of screen reading applications is bypassing these issues + avoiding parsing weird websites by just doing AI driven OCR.

I used to use Zalgo text to make it harder to read my name when I use it, as I use my “real name” and didn’t want it to be scraped by bots, but some folks literally blocked me on social media after a bit of a spat that I’ll admit was caused by a misunderstanding on my part. Apparently, these kinds of characters’ interpretations are context-specific, and using them as a person as strike-throughs is readily apparent for some, but while the meaning is possible to be deduced by an AI, it shouldn’t be expected or assumed to be understood. My HN username in Zalgo text was taking over 30 seconds to read all of the diacritics per post on platforms I used it on, so I had to change my ways or admit that I didn’t care about the experience others had, the latter of which couldn’t be further from the truth.

AI has a hard time deriving how many r’s are in strawberry, so I won’t expect it to parse my text on behalf of others any time soon, though I don’t think you meant any harm. In the interest of respect for those who don’t have a choice in using tech to help them do what comes easily and naturally to me, I thought I’d pay forward the knowledge of how the world and our perceptions of it is as unique as every individual.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#28

Post by a2128 »

fooker wrote: post #26
aspenmayer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots. Please consider users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, as your nonstandard usage of nonstandard characters makes parsing your comment difficult if not impossible. Not a slight or a correction, as I am a fan of Zalgo text myself, but after being informed by others about how inscrutable it can be to the differently abled, I have reconsidered usi…

Didn't realize that, thanks! I wonder if the future of screen reading applications is bypassing these issues + avoiding parsing weird websites by just doing AI driven OCR.

TalkBack on Android seems to read it just fine, assumedly without needing any fancy AI or OCR

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#29

Post by spookie »

AlienRobot wrote: post #15
ratg13 wrote: post #3

It's ironic that the "solution" to the problem is being driven by yet another person that isn't native to Greenland. While they may be a Greenlandic teacher, it's almost assured that they are teaching western Greenlandic, which is similar to Canadian Inuktitut. People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds that it's often considered a separate…

As someone who isn't a native English speaker, I believe most people who use the Internet would benefit from simply learning English rather than having an unchecked AI translate things to them. Reddit for example has joined millions of terrible Wordpress websites in auto-translating everything for SEO purposes and Google seems to be fine with this for some reason. It's ironic that it has reached the point that if you…

A lot of written text out there in other languages isn't available in English, simply put you have many eco chambers of singular languages out there. Most people are ok with just reading what they understand.

Re: AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

#30

Post by punchfunk4lyte »

fooker wrote: post #20
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jfc, not everything is about that.

I meant it as an example of--road to hell paved with good intentions and "and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing". But you do you.

That's extremely tangential. Bringing hot-button political topics into unrelated threads flattens everything into political arguments and starves all other topics of oxygen.
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