Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.
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@df No, this is marketing. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic &co want you to believe that what they're doing is artificial intelligence. My professional opinion is that LLMs are a dead end technology to creating actual intelligence. And if any of those companies did create actual intelligence for the purposes they pursue, it would be slavery, for which I cannot advocate.
@Gargron LLMs are not exclusively a product of large corporations or just marketing. Much of the research and development also takes place in open source and academic communities. The codes for these LLMs are public and can be audited or run locally. Furthermore, I argue that serious ethical reflection is necessary, but prohibition is not the way forward.
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@Gargron I'm willing to guess that machine translation of prose may serve two uses: firstly, as an assist for human translators (by preparing a very rough first cut, which they then have to refine), and secondly, as an assist for human editors in figuring out which foreign-language-works to pay a human translator (with or without AI assistance) to work on (translation costs money: knowing where to spend it is important). But those are assistive roles, not human-replacing ones.
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@Gargron ultimately LLMs like any other software is a tool. It's all about how a human uses them.
Lets take photoshop as an example. Humans generate vast amounts of garbage photoshopped images. Ever been to deviant art?
And yet the same tool is used by professionals all day every day to create stuff we like and enjoy.
The same applies to LLM use, and back to my first reply. What you lament is low quality output a human shared. Meanwhile the tool gets used masterfully to great effect elsewhere
@Tekchip
maybe these toots are slop output? philosophically average, without comprehension of qualitative significance.there is no value in the average. it is only in the deviations that standards exist. and these toots... are valorizing mediocrity. sad.
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@Shunra @cstross @Gargron
My go-to example is the Esperanto translation of Alice Through The Looking Glass published by Evertype, which has 5 different translations of "Jabberwocky", each of which is absolutely "correct" and each of which is totally different from each other. Even the names of the poem differ.
In each case one can see the decisions the translator made balancing meter, rhyme, meaning, implications & nuance of the text, based on what it meant to them; how can a computer do that?@HighlandLawyer @Shunra @cstross @Gargron i’ve always found the wealth of translations of ‘the little prince’ to be fascinating, and the way folks can trace back certain choices, showing that x translation was actually based off of y translation instead of the original french, &c.
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I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
Translation is a fine art, as word-for-word will get you a ROUGH idea (usually!) but once you get into idioms, or figures of speech, everything changes entirely, often making no sense at all.
Even outside of that, different languages or dialects have different words (or lack thereof!) "Buzzard" in Europe is a broad-winged soaring raptor; in the USA, it's slang for a vulture.
I'm on the spectrum and it took me a very long time to learn puns, figures of speech, and such. I've also watched people get confused by turns of phrase when they're ESL, or even from a different region.
It's not as common now, but I used to see artists who were non-English speakers have a warning "Do not write your letter and then push it through Google Translate to send to me in my native language. It's terrible."
Anyone who thinks AI can do translation is a liar or a fool.
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Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
@Gargron it is weird to think the utility of machine translations is in books and film and not, say, news articles, restaurant menus, weather reports, texts to a hotel, train schedules, etc.
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@Gargron ultimately LLMs like any other software is a tool. It's all about how a human uses them.
Lets take photoshop as an example. Humans generate vast amounts of garbage photoshopped images. Ever been to deviant art?
And yet the same tool is used by professionals all day every day to create stuff we like and enjoy.
The same applies to LLM use, and back to my first reply. What you lament is low quality output a human shared. Meanwhile the tool gets used masterfully to great effect elsewhere
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@Gargron while all your examples are 100% valid, I seriously question whether we would be able to manage to do that today. With the utter shambles most democracies are in currently, multi-national Corporations can run roughshod on environmental protection, worker safety, child protection and just about everything that past generations fought hard for.
imagine for a moment, the billionaires have been beheaded and the yachts sunk into the sea. the value in the output of workers 100% reinvested into local communities. all of it. none for colonial masters far away. the 20 hour work weeks and all human workers hands full of the satisfaction their efforts are meaningful... no more busy work for shareholders to skim value out of. only meaningful work. custom artisanal everything. housewares repaired by local handicrafters. clothes sewn and tailored to each body. homes and townhomes and communal living spaces built and maintained by cooperative owners. neighboring towns and regions and nations translating with loving care between the communities of meaning... interconnected with care.
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I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
True story: I wanted to read the novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo some years back, so I went to the bookstore and they had two translations. The first had a serious-looking cover and the other had a trashy-looking one, so naturally I bought the former. Started to read it. It was garbage! So I went back and exchanged for the trashy-looking book. A wonderful translation!
Moral of the story: you can't judge a book by its cover.
Also, translation is art.
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@cygnathreadbare @Gargron yeah, that's a garbage way this technology has been developed. Unfortunately if we threw away every technology built on the back of people doing bad things we wouldn't have much technology, unfortunately.
I don't fault lamenting how it's come to be and even how it's used broadly. But claiming it's useless because some folks use it poorly isn't really accurate indicator of the technologies usefulness.
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Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
@Gargron You sound like me arguing against the inevitability of mass use of the cell phone.
I never understood why we gave up crystal clear audio, a two way simultaneous connection (yes, both parties could talk at the same time and hear wha5 the other had to say), and phone books for unintelligible garbled speak, dropped calls, delays, and no way to look up the damn phone number.
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@melioristicmarie @Gargron okay, sure, maybe my toots are slop. So...what? I should be deleted as the OP implied of LLMs? How about all those folks making mediocre art over on deviant art? Disappear them too?
That's a bit of a moral quandary isn't it? How do we get the good stuff without the bad stuff?
You stand to make the world perfect if you can figure that out. I look forward to it.
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@melioristicmarie @Gargron okay, sure, maybe my toots are slop. So...what? I should be deleted as the OP implied of LLMs? How about all those folks making mediocre art over on deviant art? Disappear them too?
That's a bit of a moral quandary isn't it? How do we get the good stuff without the bad stuff?
You stand to make the world perfect if you can figure that out. I look forward to it.
human, is fine. perfection is a scam sold by ponzi schemers who have no useful skill. second sons of the british empire looking for some purpose that makes daddy approve of their existence.
maybe... just maybe... talk to a human and ask them how you can help them, with your actual meat space body. then maybe you could find some meaning in life instead of trying to get techbros to think you are pretty.
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Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
@Gargron we also had Concorde but it wasn’t economically viable. I mention that because I find that economic arguments seem to be heard more readily than moral arguments. (I often find that moral arguments induce temporary deafness in pro-AI people.)
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@Gargron It is a technology that humanity has been seeking for a long time. At least since the 1950s, with Turing and his colleagues.
Transformers are neural networks.
LLMs are transformers wrapped in some Python scripting.
Every neural network can be accurately represented as an Excel sheet, even if it ends up having billions of cells.
Since it's just addition and multiplication, the model is fully deterministic. Same input, same output. Not intelligent.
It's Python code that does probabilistic sampling of the output. It's just a few lines of well-understood math plus a dice roll. Again, not intelligent.
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From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.
@Gargron is it art if a person uses words and an LLM to create and tweak an image until it's what they envisioned in their head?
Years ago I had a friend who insisted that those that used a computer (e.g. photoshop) to "draw" were not real artist and that it was letting the computer do the work. To him it wasn't art.
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Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
@Gargron if asbestos was invented last year it would be inevitable, I'm afraid.
When almost all legislative power has been captured by corporatism there's not much hope we could outlaw such poisons.
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I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
@Gargron Speaking as a human translator, I have to admit that machine translation has gotten a lot better over the past few years. I’ve been shocked at how good it is sometimes. But it’s still wrong often enough to be a problem. I make mistakes too, but I generally know when I’m having trouble understanding something and can flag it so someone else can check it. MT never knows whether it’s wrong (it never knows anything), and it sprays out plausible-seeming text that camouflages the problem. And of course, I’m just talking about the level of a factually correct translation, not even matters of style, etc.
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I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
@Gargron It's not so much that translated literature doesn't exist, it's that *publishers* think anglophone readers are scared of translated literature (I'm a professional translator, at the London Book Fair this week, and this subject has come up several times).
But yes, machine translation is bloody awful, and it's terrible to work with as a human translator too - it doesn't "make our lives easier", you have to throw it all out and start again from scratch. Except obviously you're only being pad a fraction of your normal translation rate because "it's easier".
It is not easier. It's never possible to merely edit a machine translated text and end up with something as good as a competent human translator could have produced.
Another conversation I'm having this week is how translators can convey their value to publishers and agents, but now I'm wondering whether we shouldn't also be asking how readers can convey their desire for human translated literature, and lots more of it.
Inevitably, translated literature is opening up a new world, new experiences, new ways of thinking and seeing, to the reader. We all need more of that to fight back against the narrow-minded control freakery of the right wing.
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imagine for a moment, the billionaires have been beheaded and the yachts sunk into the sea. the value in the output of workers 100% reinvested into local communities. all of it. none for colonial masters far away. the 20 hour work weeks and all human workers hands full of the satisfaction their efforts are meaningful... no more busy work for shareholders to skim value out of. only meaningful work. custom artisanal everything. housewares repaired by local handicrafters. clothes sewn and tailored to each body. homes and townhomes and communal living spaces built and maintained by cooperative owners. neighboring towns and regions and nations translating with loving care between the communities of meaning... interconnected with care.
@melioristicmarie @DJGummikuh @Gargron That's a dreamy vision. Thank you. I love it.
