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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?"

#41

Post by rootusrootus »

exe34 wrote: post #20
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…

> Again, I don't speak French so I cannot say for sure This reminds me of the adage, that ChatGPT is really great at everything except my own work.

Yes, it is another variation on the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. I have a number of non-developers in my circle of friends who think Claude is about to put me out of work. They think it is just a great tool for them, not a replacement. Of course!

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

#42

Post by carlosjobim »

Translating is one thing that artificial intelligence undeniably excels at, and the value of this alone is enough to underpin the trillion dollar valuations of the gigantic AI companies.

Translation is a gigantic boon for business, but just as important for human connection, for culture, science, art, and entertainment. The value of automatic and cheap translation between all languages, this tower of Babylon, is immeasurable.

Human translators will always be better than any AI at their job. But they don't have unlimited time and energy, and they aren't cheap. AI makes good to great translations available to everybody.

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

#43

Post by ixtli »

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…

This is sort of missing the point-- people who dont deal with linguistics dont understand that there are multiple types of translation. There's word for word (which is what you're talking about) and sense for sense. If you let an LLM do all of your translation you're letting it interpret huge amounts of intent and context it doesnt (and probably cant) access. The ways in which this impacts the translation will forever be unknown to you and in the worst case lost forever.

So i guess in the end it just matters how important the work is.

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

#44

Post by graemep »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #23
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…

> there will be a point where we will not trust human input without counter check by AI That's nonsense. There is zero reason to believe that AI (with the current techniques) will ever become reliable enough to let it do its own thing, let alone better than a human. It's been years of development and you still can't trust it to get basic facts correct, not even "well it's better than it used to be". Saying it'll repl…

It can spot mistakes made by a human if asked to review code or write tests.

GP is is over the top ins saying humans will "be inferior soon" but AI can be a nice additional check so AI review might be come standard.

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

#45

Post by xp84 »

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.

2. AI is a terrible replacement for me - my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do. It’s a tool at best.

This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it.

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

#46

Post by ixtli »

Drupon wrote: post #14

An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.

I wish more people had casual exposure to professional translators. Its a deeply important, vanishingly small segment of the human population and has been this way for at least many thousands of years. Also, it will continue to be!

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

#47

Post by athrowaway3z »

So i assume this post is just a bit of writing out frustration, but i'm always hoping that "AI can't do it" posts to include examples.

A list of "Examples AI will silently fail at" would be a lot more interesting, and might just convince your next potential client to _not_ use AI.

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

#48

Post by graemep »

greiskul wrote: post #35
qsort wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. If you are bilingual, you quickly realize how some translations are very bad. How some translations are very good. And how hard it is to translate. With dry, simple text, it might be easy. But when it involves art? Some jokes don't translate directly. There is pun. Sounds of words. Double meaning. Ambiguity. Cultural background. The creation of new words. It can be reasonably argued that some poetry can be impos…

Or if you compare a poetic translation to a literal one, of different translations of the same work to the same language to each other.

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

#49

Post by carlosjobim »

inigyou wrote: post #19
xigoi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This. I put things through Google translate all the time and they're always unreliable. Sometimes they're correct, sometimes I need to know roughly what the original said. Infamously, Google used to say "geiler Typ" meant "horny guy" when it means "awesome guy". Google used to think "geil" meant "horny" in general, which it can but not usually

Google Translate is at the bottom of the barrel. All other AI translation tools are vastly superior. You'd want to evaluate those, and forget about Google Translate completely.

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

#50

Post by smallerfish »

inigyou wrote: post #19
xigoi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This. I put things through Google translate all the time and they're always unreliable. Sometimes they're correct, sometimes I need to know roughly what the original said. Infamously, Google used to say "geiler Typ" meant "horny guy" when it means "awesome guy". Google used to think "geil" meant "horny" in general, which it can but not usually

Google translate is primitive compared to Claude at translations.
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