Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.
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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.
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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.
@Tekchip my walls are full of art by humans that some would call terrible... who the fuck cares? they have love and craft and pain and power from the hands and soul of a human creator. they are beautiful. i fucking love bad art.
slop generation is the nothingness.
just write your toot from your heart, fuck the machine. being human is fine.
@Gargron -
@melioristicmarie @DJGummikuh @Gargron That's a dreamy vision. Thank you. I love it.
@mason
hanging on to the hope we can survive as a species and get to the good stuff of loving each other up, bigly. ;
@DJGummikuh @Gargron -
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.
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@geolaw @Tacas @Gargron their subtitles for the English dub are also terrible in a way that can only be machine generated without any oversight
Besides "misheard" words, missing punctuation and names changing their spelling it is also never clear who says what or when a different person starts talking
I hate it so much (and I'm at least able to notice when they are wrong since I'm not deaf and can understand the audio in most cases. It must be worse for others) -
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 It's hard to put the brakes on advances, like the Ghost Shirt Society finds out at the end of Vonnegut's Player Piano.
I heard an interview with a professor yesterday who wrote a book on the benefits of keeping cash alive and not relying completely on digital payment systems. He suggested using cash at least once a week. Maybe people will be able to do that with AI - limit their use and rely on their own brains at least some of the time. https://blogs.bu.edu/zagorsky/
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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 This was even true in the 1600s, when the Companies of (human) Translators were translating the Bible into English (the so-called "King James" version, 1611).
Translations of human language require the ability to translate the _sense_ of some local or regional usage into something similar in the target language.
They include a footnote indicating that one passage was essentially untranslatable, because the phrase was not understood by anyone. So they used context instead.
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@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.)
@benedictc @Gargron imagine the cost of the subscription if all of those companies worked with real money and had to turn a profit from the start.
Imagine that they had to pay real copyright fees for all the content used in training the models.
Imagine that any of the illegal uses of the training data and the people that died using their products had meaningful consequences in court.
Imagine that they had to pay the full tax, the full price of the services that they use.
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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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@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.
@df
Consciously not using something ≠ prohibition
Edit: Also, who cares who worked/ envisioned or works on this now? If you think about LLMs enough, you will likely see enough good arguments about the resource waste, centralization of power and multiplication of slop which describe LLMs. We lived without it before and we can live without it in future times. -
@Gargron would you know if you've seen a good outcome of an LLM? You'd somehow be able to identify when the LLM got it right?
I assure you you've experienced good LLM output and don't even know it. Because that's what good LLM output looks like. Indistinguishable from human output.
Your examples are perhaps false equivalencies. Take asbestos. We didn't abolish insulation. We developed better, safer insulation. We didn't stop dying food colors, we just developed safer dyes etc.
Let me ask you this: It's your birthday.
5 of your friends met some days before and wrote a song for you. It's not really good, the text doesn't even rhyme...but they did this for you and they had fun.
They enjoyed the act of creating.5 other friends wrote a prompt and pressed a button to generate a song.
Which song will you remember?
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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
I could not agree more -
@Gargron It is a technology that humanity has been seeking for a long time. At least since the 1950s, with Turing and his colleagues.
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@grishka One problem with LLMs is that they tend to translate and summarise what’s likely to be in the source text, not what’s actually in the text.
This means that when translating/summarising a text that deviates from the usual content in a subject or genre, the LLM will push it towards the common.
Using the result to understand the original contents is therefore very risky. For example, when screening texts, ”incorrect” content might be ”corrected”, increasing the likelihood it will pass.
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Let me ask you this: It's your birthday.
5 of your friends met some days before and wrote a song for you. It's not really good, the text doesn't even rhyme...but they did this for you and they had fun.
They enjoyed the act of creating.5 other friends wrote a prompt and pressed a button to generate a song.
Which song will you remember?
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@Tekchip my walls are full of art by humans that some would call terrible... who the fuck cares? they have love and craft and pain and power from the hands and soul of a human creator. they are beautiful. i fucking love bad art.
slop generation is the nothingness.
just write your toot from your heart, fuck the machine. being human is fine.
@Gargron
