Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs.
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@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/
@KerryMitchell @Gargron Saying that it's hard is not the same as saying that it's impossible.
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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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@Tekchip @Gargron The technology doesn't yet do much of what is claimed for it; and it is already expensive in terms of externalized costs: memory, energy, water. It really looks like the future of LLMs depends on mass acceptance of the "what-if" scenario - those hoped-for advances where it works better, uses less energy, and somehow doesn't wipe out thousands of middle- to low-level jobs.
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@Gargron But it seems that LLMs are here to stay. This time, it doesn't seem to be just a passing fad. There is a lot of investment involved.
@df @Gargron alright, well, let's review:
* literally no one likes it, not even the normies who do not care about any of the myriad ethical issues surrounding it
* a bunch of very rich people dropped an unprecedented amount of cash to make it happen and now, in their desperation for that investment to pay off, are trying VERY hard to gaslight people into thinking they like itsounds inevitable to me
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@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.
@benjaminmetzler @Gargron I don't know. Maybe. But even if that's possible (which I doubt) I don't know anyone who would spend enough money on credits to do it when they could be churning out random art pieces they think are pretty and not spending too long on each one.
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@cstross @Gargron I have a friend who worked for years as a translator (English to French) but in recent years he found that he was no longer being asked to translate but to "post-edit" machine translations. It was taking him just as long, paying him less, and destroying his soul.
He now works as a tour guide.
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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 I'm pretty sure J.R.R. Tolkien would view LLM's as an abomination
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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.
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@qgustavor @aeva @Gargron Netflix does proper translations to bigger languages? I've by far watched their Watership Down, and the Finnish translation in subtitles was just awful, characters' names kept changing between episodes and translator confused Holly with Vervain several times. Hadn't I known source material and kept English audio, it would have been really hard to follow. So I just thought any Netflix-translation must be taken with grain of salt...
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@Gargron But it seems that LLMs are here to stay. This time, it doesn't seem to be just a passing fad. There is a lot of investment involved.
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@ainmosni @df @Gargron my take is: Investors will figure out it’s too expensive to be a viable business so big AI providers will fail, especially those who try to archive „general knowledge“ AI like OpenAI.
Small models will then be the focus, and integrating them on-device for AI assistance. Latest models, like Gwen 3.5-9b already show promising results and performance locally.
The question is who will invest in training small models to deploy on-device and will those models be open sourced? I hope they will. -
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.
Sadly we're all gonna pay for them!
One way or another!
We must shun them as much as possible!
Have a good day!
Well mmmmm we think too hard. -
@ainmosni @df @Gargron my take is: Investors will figure out it’s too expensive to be a viable business so big AI providers will fail, especially those who try to archive „general knowledge“ AI like OpenAI.
Small models will then be the focus, and integrating them on-device for AI assistance. Latest models, like Gwen 3.5-9b already show promising results and performance locally.
The question is who will invest in training small models to deploy on-device and will those models be open sourced? I hope they will.@kevin @df @Gargron small models are well and good and hopefully will be focused on actually useful things, as I'm personally still not convinced that LLMs are really that useful at all, and are taking winds out of the sail out of other AI avenues that have been very useful, things that we would classify as machine learning.
But if we want general models... those might just take too many resources to build and I honestly think society will be better off with no new ones of those anyway, while letting stuff like ollama collect enough bitrot that it loses most of its damaging potential.
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@kevin @df @Gargron small models are well and good and hopefully will be focused on actually useful things, as I'm personally still not convinced that LLMs are really that useful at all, and are taking winds out of the sail out of other AI avenues that have been very useful, things that we would classify as machine learning.
But if we want general models... those might just take too many resources to build and I honestly think society will be better off with no new ones of those anyway, while letting stuff like ollama collect enough bitrot that it loses most of its damaging potential.
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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 circa 2000 I came to the conclusion to consider translated textbooks only when the translators name was mentioned on the title.
This came after the worst translation ever, that translated SQL commands in sample code
And back then it was all human, went downhill recently (though machines are useful for small snippets)
Never regretted this decision.
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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 safety of food ingredient translations went down like a rock when machine translation went over to llm. It's equally plausible for an ingredients list to contain or not contain an allergen, but only one is true.
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@Gargron
And on the other hand, Maths people have always been saying stay the hell away from it!
https://dotnet.social/@SmartmanApps/116000100388648367@SmartmanApps @Gargron unfortunately, not all of them.
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@VileLasagna @Gargron oh that’s probably John Ciardi’s translation
@maco @VileLasagna @Gargron oh, I would have assumed the Dorothy L Sayers translation. Good lord, are there two rhyming translations into English?
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@kevin @df @Gargron small models are well and good and hopefully will be focused on actually useful things, as I'm personally still not convinced that LLMs are really that useful at all, and are taking winds out of the sail out of other AI avenues that have been very useful, things that we would classify as machine learning.
But if we want general models... those might just take too many resources to build and I honestly think society will be better off with no new ones of those anyway, while letting stuff like ollama collect enough bitrot that it loses most of its damaging potential.
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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 this!!
