miniwa.moe:9999

Post B49kjsCMdseh2k9l8y by IngaLovinde@embracing.space
(DIR) More posts by IngaLovinde@embracing.space
(DIR) Post #B47sdGIF4RO93uLPOK by Gargron@mastodon.social
3 likes, 10 repeats

Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It&#39;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&#39;s absolute garbage.

(DIR) Post #B47so5PtqjD6Vy5UzA by ErikUden@mastodon.de
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@Gargron thank you. When writing the German subtitles for No Other Land I had to basically do it all by hand because the context window was so narrow it got everything wrong that could be lost in translation.

(DIR) Post #B47svSBrZmWXAm2F3Q by Gargron@mastodon.social
1 likes, 3 repeats

I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don&#39;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.

(DIR) Post #B47szgkJOtktTUAS7k by dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz
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@Gargron In the actual literature, pre-machine translation, it was well-established that translation amounts to authorship, with the clear example of poetry -- translating poetry into a new language is absolutely an act of authorship, not a mechanical act.It may be somewhat less true of other kinds of works, but now we&#39;re talking about degree, not of kind.Admittedly LLM translation is pretty handy sometimes when there&#39;s no other translation alternative, but we must be prepared for it to fail utterly at times -- like other uses of LLMs.

(DIR) Post #B47t5pi0zPIl0h1UwK by DJRNDM@chaos.social
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@Gargron Denkt einfach nur an Erik Simons Übersetzungen der Witcher-Reihe (und &quot;Etwas endet, etwas beginnt&quot;-Kurzgeschichten). Viele Wortspiele aus dem Polnischen würden 1:1 gar nicht funktionieren. Deshalb hat Erik Simon, wie ein guter Übersetzer das tut, sich eine Menge künstlerischen Freiraums erlaubt, um den Sinn und Wortwitz des Originals zu erhalten, wo immer nötig.

(DIR) Post #B47t88a9n2z47jRk2q by inanedirk@metalhead.club
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@Gargron ironically, I feel translations have become worse with the rise of LLMs. For example, I recently saw a Microsoft KB article that had a table with Yes / No in its cells, translated to German as Ja / Nr.

(DIR) Post #B47t91x5vT0nqnbKvw by VileLasagna@mastodon.gamedev.place
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@Gargron Back in my pretentious high schooler days I read Dante&#39;s Comedy and, don&#39;t know where from, the version I found was one that was like... fully translated as poetry, like in the Italian* original, going as far as trying to replicate the rhyme structureNo computer&#39;s ever going to pull off anything even remotely that mad

(DIR) Post #B47tExJo4CFDDW39mq by jernej__s@infosec.exchange
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@Gargron I&#39;ve seen way too many machine-translated instructions, and that&#39;s something you really don&#39;t want to have machine-translated, for obvious reasons.

(DIR) Post #B47tL7wfTAJ7ufAaOW by cstross@wandering.shop
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@Gargron I&#39;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.

(DIR) Post #B47tWkZCDSwCsejWPQ by funcrunch@me.dm
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@Gargron - I think the most recent translated book series I read was Liu Cixin&#39;s Remembrance of Earth&#39;s Past trilogy,* translated into English by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen. I don&#39;t know a word of Chinese, but I can&#39;t imagine machine translation doing these great works any justice.* Later adapted into the Netflix series 3 Body Problem

(DIR) Post #B47tXhkaAm6QR3Vwqe by Steve@social.coop
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@Gargron As someone who translates into English, I appreciate you saying this.It&#39;s true there&#39;s a lot of very good literature in English, but I&#39;m pretty convinced that the majority of anglophones don&#39;t know what they&#39;re missing by not reading translated books.

(DIR) Post #B47tgH46kyESHNjXVI by jgrg@mstdn.science
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@Gargron I&#39;ve just bought an English translation of Mikhail Bulgakov&#39;s The Master and Margarita. I wondered which was the best translation, and found a website with multiple translations of the opening page. It was really interesting how different they were. The one by Diana Burgin&#39;s and Katherine Tiernan O&#39;Connor was the clear winner for me.

(DIR) Post #B47u7LE3OdE509IAyG by gorfeld@masto.es
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@Gargron Many times when I land on an auto-translated site I have to change the language to english because I don&#39;t even understand what&#39;s supposed to mean.

(DIR) Post #B47u8ZpEbI7oZTGwTY by ids1024@mathstodon.xyz
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@Gargron Yeah, people who don&#39;t know anything about language or translation seem to think of translation as a perfect example of a &quot;mechanical&quot; process that should be automate-able.*Maybe* for some kinds of technical writing (which still has its difficulties), but good translation of literature is probably one of the hardest things to replace humans for, right alongside writing good literature in the first place.

(DIR) Post #B47uEMyBJJaqRBDelM by Shunra@wandering.shop
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@Gargron much of my work is as a legal translator (evidence, wiretaps, court filings, etc.)The party that relies on machine translations or worse, AI translations, is the party that will lose the case. Any translator can pick holes in an AI translation big enough to cross through with a herd of elephants. Those &quot;translations&quot; lack nuance.

(DIR) Post #B47uM8DO3IYezd25k8 by foobarsoft@mastodon.social
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@Gargron Native speaker: I think you’re right. Though I have seen warnings recently about “new translation” editions on Amazon that are just LLM trash.

(DIR) Post #B47uVNv91n1iJGud04 by cktodon@mas.to
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@Gargron @mastodon.social I absolutely agree.On the other hand, although I&#39;m a native spanish speaker, I&#39;ve read a couple of books in english.I think that US pleople don&#39;t even consider reading in any language but english.

(DIR) Post #B47uXMRHVXDuIGt11s by grishka@friends.grishka.me
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I don&#39;t get the machine translation argument. LLMs do even that poorly, certainly noticeably worse than a purpose-trained translation model, which is I believe what at least Google Translate uses.My pet peeve about machine translation is how someone at Google and Microsoft thought that it&#39;s a good idea to &quot;helpfully&quot; translate developer documentation into your system language by default. As in, you have to look for a button to read it in English. Who in their right mind could possibly want that?..

(DIR) Post #B47ujL62KEhtbXf2ZM by lauerhahn@sfba.social
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@Gargron I minored in linguistics in college, and a lot of exciting work was being done at the time around developing syntax models of how languages worked (and different ways humans use syntax), in part to inform machine translation models. This was more than 25 years ago. No LLMs involved. I have not kept up with current developments in machine translation but I strongly suspect that it&#39;s built on the foundation of those decades of work actually understanding how languages function, and what maps or doesn&#39;t map. Which is completely different than expecting generative AI to create a model.

(DIR) Post #B47uvo3GUonEsnJF4K by Vorsos@beige.party
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@Gargron

(DIR) Post #B47vARrHICiqOYgURk by mayank@front-end.social
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@Gargron 💯 languages are usually not 1:1, and translation is impossible to automate without butchering the original meaning.bad translation really sticks out when you understand both languages. even if it&#39;s serviceable enough to get the core meaning across, it might fail to capture the tone, the cultural references, and the full weight.i have a lot of respect for people who create good subtitles that try to preserve the original intent, even when it sometimes feels impossible.

(DIR) Post #B47vMg28PpnTpjarbc by Tubemeister@mstdn.social
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@Gargron Yes. My wife for years shunned Pratchett completely because she read a Dutch translation in the 90s.

(DIR) Post #B47vYI2NSTnoszFDwe by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
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@grishka @Gargron Yeah, and at least when it comes to some types of documents you can end up learning the source language quirks or the machine translation quirks (like random gender assignments), but if it&#39;s an unknown/random source language then you&#39;re out of luck.(Hence why I always want the source material as well whenever machine translation has been used, so at least the obviously broken parts can be fixed, potentially with a dictionary, or could ask someone who knows the source language)

(DIR) Post #B47vgJWho0N3oyFxia by ronanmcd@mastodon.green
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@Gargron I am an anglophone, but read in French from time to time. I tend to have a machine translator nearby to augment my poor vocabulary. Last book I read it told me nineteenth century Breton people had horses hoofs on their feet. The actual translation should have been clogs.This stuff is constant, that&#39;s just one I remember

(DIR) Post #B47vnn1CYOs5Jd5M24 by benroyce@mastodon.social
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@Gargron on the plus side, machine translation illuminated me as to the involvement of the presbyterian church in the famous movie &quot;Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Episode_III_%E2%80%93_Revenge_of_the_Sith#Backstroke_of_the_West

(DIR) Post #B47vwyt5nH4KjXfvWq by etchedpixels@mastodon.social
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@Gargron In addition a lot of anglophone people speak only one language, so they&#39;ve never been able to compare the translation of a book between two languages they speak.

(DIR) Post #B47wUX8xS5ewX55y2C by DenOfEarth@mas.to
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@Gargron And it&#39;s not just expressions and turns of phrase, which are unique not only to each language but easily to each region.It&#39;s words. There is often no exact match. Many words in one language are not a precise correspondence to those in another.So an elegant turn of phrase in one becomes a wordy explanation in the other. Or a misinterpretation.Only someone fluent in both languages can convey the true meaning accurately and eloquently.

(DIR) Post #B47xs5vaOI6L1qdhD6 by aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place
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@Gargron I think anglophones experience start difference between good and bad translations more often through video games

(DIR) Post #B47yAeuJ4pywjBtQW0 by juandesant@mathstodon.xyz
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@Gargron to make matters worse, at least in the UK when you buy a DVD it only comes with English audio, English audio with descriptions, and maybe original audio, and just English subtitles, and English for the hard of hearing. That’s it. But in Spain, the same DVD, locked to the same region, carried the original audio, audio described English audio, Spanish dubbing, German dubbing, Italian dubbing… and all those languages in subtitles, plus some more.So it is really difficult for them to be exposed to non-English content,

(DIR) Post #B47ykFZijpsMaSEeKu by gbargoud@masto.nyc
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@Gargron My main use case for machine translations is spot checking words in languages I don&#39;t know as well as I should.They are great for that.

(DIR) Post #B47yqv7LCLANAK8pZw by qgustavor@urusai.social
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@Gargron I worked with subtitle translations for years... I need to comment on this!The main issue people working with machine translated subtitles is that people take models for translating things in a single modal – text – and applying to a multimodal media – video. Of course the results are horrible!There are research on improving that, sure, I did some, even, but even we are FAAAR from getting them any good. Translating &quot;The nurse aided the doctor take care of the patient.&quot; to many languages require guessing the gender of three people! LLMs will often default to male, female and male, due to bias.But, the sad thing we have to admit: many works of art are so unpopular the only translations people will have are machine ones, from weird anime like Sazae-san, to Mastodon toots.

(DIR) Post #B47zZZWCLjkNCz3lcO by kaleissin@wandering.shop
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@Gargron Preach!

(DIR) Post #B4802iVI1NhxTRX3Zo by beandreams@friendhole.social
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@Gargron Douglas Hofstadter&#39;s 2018 assessment of the state of machine translation holds up remarkably well (he agreed with you):https://web.archive.org/web/20180130225442/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/

(DIR) Post #B4803zELJk5ndlD8d6 by sloanlance@mastodon.social
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@Gargron For many years, YouTube has been filled with tragic machine-translated captions, even before the new AI trend of the past few years. Not only machine translated ones, but also machine generated ones converted from spoken words.The problem with any machine translations or generated captions is that people aren&#39;t proofreading them. Viewers get garbage and the machines didn&#39;t get proper feedback.

(DIR) Post #B480DDhAuF1n6p6Ez2 by howtophil@mastodon.social
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@Gargron This.

(DIR) Post #B480IGIWeqI2d0yTWC by natty@astolfo.social
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@Gargron@mastodon.social I think it&#39;s actually perfectly fine to just accept they fill their niche of roughly guessing what something means despite the fact modern translation models work pretty much the same as actual large language models? People trying to gotcha over this are usually not acting in good faith anyway (or dangerously reducing/simplifying things)

(DIR) Post #B480ONLpLZ7sF0Qxma by Stefan_S_from_H@mastodon.social
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@Gargron Yes, the German version of Lord of the Rings has different translators. When I tried reading it as a kid, I felt so lost. It was boring as hell.Decades later I heard that the first translation is considered a bad one.

(DIR) Post #B480WFIr9Wi7b6nTu4 by Gargron@mastodon.social
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From what I&#39;ve observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don&#39;t understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don&#39;t understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don&#39;t understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don&#39;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.

(DIR) Post #B480cwu5xY5GYmPa40 by webhat@infosec.exchange
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@Gargron I was read the Rig Veda, machine translated from Sanskrit to English. It was great for understanding the words that were used. And after I read a human translation I understood the text, in as far as one can understand a religious text

(DIR) Post #B480urEhlo72C8aiIK by Gargron@mastodon.social
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Technology is not inevitable. We&#39;ve decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you&#39;re going to argue that it&#39;s not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It&#39;s allowed.

(DIR) Post #B4811QalEOaTaP2Zg8 by dudinka@mastodon.world
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@Gargroni do appreciate automatic subtitles extremely for hitting all my humor-chords. may they never evolve.that being said:i am lucky and able to read in several languages and read a lot of our bookclub books in original language. i can&#39;t count how many times i liked books that many of the others couldn&#39;t even finish their translated ones (assumedly) because the language was so poor. (and then we have those who listen to books and it totally depends on the person who was recorded.

(DIR) Post #B481DhwMYX2Wrm04VE by freequaybuoy@mastodon.social
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@Gargron Just before LLMs burst onto the scene, not long after my Creative Writing MA, a friend&#39;s partner told me about them and how they could, &quot;write a novel as well a human.&quot; I think he expected me to be shocked or horrified by this, but as a student of literature and writing, I was far more astonished that apparently someone had come up with a way to determine the final analysis of a text! A Computer Science analogy might be someone telling you they&#39;d found a solution to the Halting Problem

(DIR) Post #B481ENZRm7fHyrbMcC by DJGummikuh@mastodon.social
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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.

(DIR) Post #B481PTR4JHlDM6yO4e by JeffGrigg@mastodon.social
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@Gargron My experience has been that LLM translations are almost good enough to verify that a message is a scam.

(DIR) Post #B481lD9dWWm5EPBV3I by funcrunch@me.dm
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@Gargron - Re music, when I asked my spouse today what he&#39;d add to my list of &quot;things humans can do that AI bots can&#39;t&quot; (https://me.dm/@funcrunch/116206885885065034), he said live audio mixing. (He&#39;s a professional audio engineer.)ETA: I gave the same response as to when he proposed &quot;Empathy&quot;: AI bots *pretend* they can do this, and are convincing at it. That&#39;s the problem.RT: https://me.dm/users/funcrunch/statuses/116206885885065034

(DIR) Post #B481tu2rwMcqZVACps by Gargron@mastodon.social
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@df No, this is marketing. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic &amp;co want you to believe that what they&#39;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.

(DIR) Post #B481wuCtnNANwTHqIC by Offbeatmammal@mastodon.social
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@Gargron i haven&#39;t actually used French in almost 30 years, but still get annoyed watching movies where the subtitles are wrong. I have been known to pause, check a translation, curse at whoever did the captions for missing subtleties (in their subtitles), and the hit play again!

(DIR) Post #B4821a1wEuiCoSOBTE by spaceflight@spacey.space
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@Gargron &quot;I&#39;m sorry Dave, I&#39;m afraid I can&#39;t do that.&quot; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy4EfdnMZ5g

(DIR) Post #B482kIMKmq6J2RFc6y by mastodonmigration@mastodon.online
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@Gargron Machine vs. Human translation of fiction is an excellent analogy. Good translation involves an understanding of complicated material in an intuitive and nuanced way, and conveying those subtleties cleverly using equally complex forms in the target language while retaining the beauty of the writing. It involves much higher level thought than what LLMs do.Likewise software engineering is much more complex and involves higher level thinking than prompted LLM code generation.

(DIR) Post #B4833ZH07osmzwwjCq by jason@logoff.website
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@Gargron yes some people have stunted systems of ethics and values, what about it.

(DIR) Post #B483iHiEJwNcPJ674C by Arrow@furries.club
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@GargronTranslation 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!) &quot;Buzzard&quot; in Europe is a broad-winged soaring raptor; in the USA, it&#39;s slang for a vulture.I&#39;m on the spectrum and it took me a very long time to learn puns, figures of speech, and such. I&#39;ve also watched people get confused by turns of phrase when they&#39;re ESL, or even from a different region.It&#39;s not as common now, but I used to see artists who were non-English speakers have a warning &quot;Do not write your letter and then push it through Google Translate to send to me in my native language. It&#39;s terrible.&quot;Anyone who thinks AI can do translation is a liar or a fool.

(DIR) Post #B483jG02AsGxNttB9E by jason@logoff.website
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@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.

(DIR) Post #B484J6t9WgdTYIlZYG by HappytoBe@mastodon.social
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@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.

(DIR) Post #B48568TOQKLSek5vSS by benedictc@mas.to
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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.)

(DIR) Post #B485KyRQ0JPht2FL6m by qwazix@bananachips.club
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@Gargron if asbestos was invented last year it would be inevitable, I&#39;m afraid.When almost all legislative power has been captured by corporatism there&#39;s not much hope we could outlaw such poisons.

(DIR) Post #B485RwiMp1eqYhUyVE by adamrice@c.im
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@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.

(DIR) Post #B485SpDQBmaHaeRXP6 by janeishly@beige.party
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@Gargron It&#39;s not so much that translated literature doesn&#39;t exist, it&#39;s that *publishers* think anglophone readers are scared of translated literature (I&#39;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&#39;s terrible to work with as a human translator too - it doesn&#39;t &quot;make our lives easier&quot;, you have to throw it all out and start again from scratch. Except obviously you&#39;re only being pad a fraction of your normal translation rate because &quot;it&#39;s easier&quot;.It is not easier. It&#39;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&#39;m having this week is how translators can convey their value to publishers and agents, but now I&#39;m wondering whether we shouldn&#39;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.

(DIR) Post #B485llDhGiNIhTbKpE by tykayn@mastodon.cipherbliss.com
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@GargronI do not agree, #Garbage is a good band.

(DIR) Post #B486ILdlOTTSvHKftw by KerryMitchell@mastodon.social
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@Gargron It&#39;s hard to put the brakes on advances, like the Ghost Shirt Society finds out at the end of Vonnegut&#39;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/

(DIR) Post #B486K6IFQO1tu76Wzw by agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
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@Gargron This was even true in the 1600s, when the Companies of (human) Translators were translating the Bible into English (the so-called &quot;King James&quot; 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.

(DIR) Post #B488LMIRbubljcvLUm by vy@mastodon.social
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@Gargron there is a great essay on translation by Simon Leys

(DIR) Post #B489xX1WHAXNxjm1uy by BenAveling@infosec.exchange
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Translations are like husbands. There are beautiful translations and there are faithful translations but the beautiful ones are not faithful and the faithful ones are not beautiful.@Gargron

(DIR) Post #B48BAnz4d0dAHdWTY0 by pointlessone@status.pointless.one
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@Gargron funnily enough the transformer block used in most LLMs was invented for translation and TBH LLMs are much better at translation than anything before them. Not refuting your point but as machine translation goes LLMs are the best we have.

(DIR) Post #B48BJq8fzB3PZaK3GK by Wally@thepit.social
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@Gargron Also, LLMs are making machine translations worse by adding hallucinated content into the translations:https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/

(DIR) Post #B48C3emaXYSTfmq1lQ by jamesmarshall@sfba.social
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@Gargron exactly. To me, all forms of art are still about the human connection-- &quot;Art is a tryst, for in it maker and beholder meet.&quot; The artist is communicating something that the beholder receives. With computer-generated art, the sentience on the other end is simply not there, and any &quot;connection&quot; is just an illusion.

(DIR) Post #B48Emkpb6AH5N6sSzw by SmartmanApps@dotnet.social
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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

(DIR) Post #B48Fi0WBRo5qWv65bM by praetor@mstdn.social
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@Gargron I&#39;ve read machine translated versions of Beowulf, which I&#39;ve read in various translations dozens of times. It&#39;s my favorite story of all time. And Old English, like Old Norse is a very descriptive language with hidden meaning behind it. And these machines loose those linquistic nuances. You can tell when a medieval text is machine translated...because they&#39;re not all that exciting. And Beowulf is exciting!

(DIR) Post #B48HI6ttIMsIhgxtwm by n_dimension@infosec.exchange
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@Gargron Look into Aymara and machine translation.Its an amazing rabbit hole.

(DIR) Post #B48HJ0QOrCYiuRb8kq by fazalmajid@vivaldi.net
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@Gargron perhaps, but my friend who is a translator (translates from Spanish to her native French in Mexico) can&#39;t find any translation jobs any more, other than cleaning up LLM translations.As someone said, the market can be irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

(DIR) Post #B48HevQk6hKLn3D6Su by the_turtle@mastodon.sdf.org
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@Gargron all your base are belong to us, man...

(DIR) Post #B48HnGO84PQf6exofY by Gabe_Fox@pawb.fun
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@Gargron @aj I literally just bought a new translation of the Odyssey. My third, I think? But yeah, as an American English speaker I mostly have encountered this in other nerdy pursuits. Specifically, anime and manga. Years of online debate over translations, how and when to do cultural translation, the merits of transliteration, etc.

(DIR) Post #B48KPOEnXAggMbuIgy by GeePawHill@mastodon.social
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@Gargron In English, the angel and demon of Russian literature is Constance Garnett, who translated much of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky.Angel, cuz she was one of the earliest sources of English translation.Demon, cuz she manages to make Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky sound like the same writer.Nabokov&#39;s Pushkin translation is an exercise in erudition. Half of every page is his translated quatrain. The other half, sometimes even more, is his footnotes about his choices &amp; alternates.

(DIR) Post #B48LePSjMY3OSa9LqS by mspong@mastodon.social
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@Gargron When they say LLMs can replace artists what they mean is, &quot;We have enough art now. The sum total of art we have is sufficient. Remixing and blending the corpus of art will be good enough forever. If not we can just tap some humans afflicted with the artist disease to generate some more, and it will be cheaper! They&#39;ll do it for free! Fools.&quot;

(DIR) Post #B48NkJMV9mcJBZB6JM by penrosepolka@mastodon.social
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@Gargron Hello How are you?

(DIR) Post #B48PZVzq2e3V5rYby4 by bardmoss@autistics.life
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@Gargron I would love to see an LLM try to translate the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

(DIR) Post #B48Rbc8KOaAIc9embw by Lamotum@toot.community
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@Gargron This is why I learn languages, so I can read the source materials myself. Bad translations sometimes mean they manipulated the meanings, and hidden censorships you won&#39;t be aware of if you don&#39;t have access to the source.

(DIR) Post #B48WeVtuWXlzvM7CXA by quixote@mastodon.nz
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@Gargron Has everyone already heard of the brilliant machine translation for the saying &quot;Out of sight, out of mind&quot;?&quot;Invisible, idiot.&quot;

(DIR) Post #B48XnNqdvtztVeNdTs by Shunra@wandering.shop
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@cstross @Gargron Machine translations are more of a hindrance than a help, for translators. If you don&#39;t know both languages well, having an automated dictionary lookup could possibly be useful - but if you&#39;re a translator, and especially a translator of fiction, having a nuanceless draft will only take more time to figure out. And it will be irritating time, because reading mistranslations is a pain. Editing one&#39;s own drafts is hard enough! As to B: Editors rely on readers, reviews /...

(DIR) Post #B48XnPPm6lh4MtpCsa by Shunra@wandering.shop
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@cstross @Gargron and the sort of awards that give a book the sheen of &quot;worth reading&quot;. My cred: I&#39;ve translated more books than I can carry. Both fiction and technical.My current position is that use of AI in translation is malpractice.

(DIR) Post #B48dY2dn69sH7LR70C by rasmus91@fosstodon.org
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@Gargron I&#39;m pretty sure J.R.R. Tolkien would view LLM&#39;s as an abomination

(DIR) Post #B48jC5Q2ghQ55Wv5Ci by mxchara@seattle.pink
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@Gargron to be fair, those in power would like to normalize lead and asbestos and so forth, because capitalism never likes to lose a business model

(DIR) Post #B48jR9WNiZSO9f4Kky by olafk@norden.social
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@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 codeAnd back then it was all human, went downhill recently (though machines are useful for small snippets)Never regretted this decision.

(DIR) Post #B48lXpD1pu2j5qKHQm by galaxis@mastodon.infra.de
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@Gargron Machine translated UIs are even worse a crime. LLMs don&#39;t have the slightest idea of the context of some random button, and (looking at Microsoft&#39;s German UI translations recently) seem to choose the worst possible word to drop into that.

(DIR) Post #B48lXpQV1oonlcd2Qa by tdelmas@mamot.fr
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@galaxis @Gargron Or Google. Last week I stumbled upon an Google admin interface where the checkbox with the English label &quot;Enforcement&quot; was translated in French with the equivalent of &quot;Activation&quot;. It was about 2FA, and those both words doesn&#39;t mean at all the same thing in that context!

(DIR) Post #B48lXpdcF3JIQIlVs8 by maco@wandering.shop
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@tdelmas @galaxis @Gargron Google Maps keeps asking if I want to “navegar a la página principal” — go to the homepage—after I drop a friend off. I understand that in some contexts, that’s how “go home” is translated, but…no.

(DIR) Post #B48lcyzyrlkCu2gNWK by philspectrum@mastodon.social
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@Gargron this!! 👆 👆 👆 👆

(DIR) Post #B48lfACOCAsuDcWh6W by AwetTesfaiesus@mastodon.social
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@Gargron That is absolutely correct if one refers to the essence of art.Yet I would distinguish between art itself and the functional quality of artistic work: i.e. creative work in the service of capitalism. I believe this is where the displacement has already happened and continues to unfold.Unfortunately, this kind of creative work puts food on the table for many artists and often enables the creation of art.

(DIR) Post #B48nnRSw560jzoLCym by TheServitor@sigmoid.social
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@Gargron I think the biggest difference is in the rate of change. At every step people are making eternal pronouncements of what LLMs can and can&#39;t do when it&#39;s a moving target.I agree with you 100% about translation, it&#39;s an art. It&#39;s a great example. You can&#39;t simply replace one human translator with another, let alone a machine.The difference is I would add &quot;yet&quot;. Looking at the arc of LLMs over less than ten years, it doesn&#39;t seem an impossibility to me, it seems a likelihood.

(DIR) Post #B48oJJl0HEZHM3zXTk by tino76H@norden.social
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@Gargron arent the subtitles so bad because the audio is translated … so understanding words in an audio recording is the problem?

(DIR) Post #B48oY9J9PQw7I62HnE by shadowdancer@mstdn.social
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@GargronBut I&#39;m sure we&#39;ll be seeing books written by LLMs translated to all the different languages - by LLMs.Oh, and then you won&#39;t even have to read the LLM translated LLM written book, because you can just ask an LLM to summarize it for you.

(DIR) Post #B48pGyMmw44yO86vmi by Firlefanz@writing.exchange
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@Gargron I&#39;m seeing more and more &quot;translations&quot; that are just run through machines (DeepL etc.). Even reading the descriptions for those books (some of which are favorite comfort books) in &quot;German&quot; makes me shudder.It&#39;s not German. It&#39;s basically English dressed up as German.Those &quot;translations&quot; are a rip-off for everyone involved except the agencies doing the &quot;translations&quot;. I&#39;ve refused to read translations for years, but they are now becoming completely unreadable.

(DIR) Post #B48pxW1OCKPovgO5g0 by elricofmelnibone@mastodon.social
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@Gargron Much like lead, it makes people dumber. Which might be what certain people want.

(DIR) Post #B48sQvkbocrB29h07M by fabio@zirk.us
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@Gargron Obviously AI will replace all skills except the one I have. The other ones are all simple, whereas the one I am competent in is very complex!

(DIR) Post #B48vPv8EvlREgfxJkO by zuthal@floofy.tech
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@Gargron Hell, if I had a button that would erase LLMs but also all technology based on artificial neural networks I would press it

(DIR) Post #B48vvFpzzsLNslMgZU by elrohir@mastodon.gal
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@Gargron Every time during the last year when I searched something in English and the results popped up as machine-translated English-to-Spanish reddit page because of my useragent/locale settings, I got the impression that the hegemonic anglophone big tech community have a very misguided understanding about how the rest of the world interacts with websites that are not in their language.

(DIR) Post #B48wKAIliUm5x6hSm8 by Life_is@no-pony.farm
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@Gargron@mastodon.social Als Blei und Asbest eingeführt wurden, war er deren Giftigkeit nicht bekannt. Insofern war es also keine Entscheidung. Bei LLMs wissen wir, dass sie giftig sind.

(DIR) Post #B4900xPdoVkcIA0kMK by hadon@mastodon.social
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@Gargron Totally agree!Even normal translations (by human translators) sometimes lose meaning nuances in the translation. In literature, it&#39;s always better to read the original version ( if you can).Now when it comes to Mastodon, I totally love it! Being able to get a rough idea of what people all over Europe think about an issue, is soooo helpful! Being able to exchange with them is priceless!

(DIR) Post #B4925QQ46nknK0T3L6 by RogerP@mastodon-belgium.be
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@Gargron fully agreed

(DIR) Post #B492PZKwfCnAlog6GO by Jamoteusz@mastodon.com.pl
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@Gargron yes. That&#39;s truth. But there is something over the good/health reason, this is: big-business earning money. Fossil fuels seems to be not the best, but it earns money for the biggest. So i&#39;t a bit like disarmament - ok... ALL we will have AtomBombs, but we are not going to use them...This same will be with LLM? This is actually a new weapon.Stop producing weapons! They kill us all.Am I being overly optimistic? Well, perhaps.

(DIR) Post #B4956xtVR2rbIIfExc by PogoHandshake@sportloto.company
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@Gargron &gt; Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sureeven here (and especially here) – no. new LLM-backed translators simply make it up when dealing with irregular grammatics which is especially common in non-English social media

(DIR) Post #B496pQfZuUvBEdupCS by CarineMissiaen@mastodon-belgium.be
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@Gargron As a Belgian federal government agent, I had to produce my texts at least in Dutch and in French. I am reasonably bilingual, but for official publications, translations have to be exact. So I sometimes looked for the help of a free translation application (as google translate). And my collegues ran into my office when I bursted out laughing. If you translate &quot;bestek&quot; (in the sens of &quot;terms of reference&quot;) in French as &quot;couvert&quot; (cutlery)...

(DIR) Post #B49ECkaIjU9PL7VyUq by archo@mastodon.gamedev.place
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@Gargron you might need to define what you mean by &quot;we&quot; :)https://theconversation.com/the-uss-asbestos-u-turn-why-the-environmental-protection-agency-is-reconsidering-its-ban-259597

(DIR) Post #B49FQpDiOTqJj2E2fw by kinsale42@mstdn.games
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@Gargron an LLM could never manage Enzensberger

(DIR) Post #B49FYBYjjhbb2HZGka by df@s.dfaria.eu
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@Gargron But it seems that LLMs are here to stay. This time, it doesn&#39;t seem to be just a passing fad. There is a lot of investment involved.

(DIR) Post #B49FYBk53WgBbSsKQq by abucci@buc.ci
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@df@s.dfaria.eu @Gargron Investment by people who only four years ago were telling us blockchain was inevitable and here to stay, and who have been telling us fully autonomous self-driving cars were right around the corner for twenty years. At some point you have to pull your head out of the fog and recognize that all of this is nothing more than marketing. Of course they want to convince you that this time it&#39;s different, this time X or Y is here to stay---because they become very wealthy if most of us believe that. That doesn&#39;t make it true.

(DIR) Post #B49GiuDMfCg8NjFMwa by ZDL@mstdn.social
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@Gargron There&#39;s nothing special about English literature. There&#39;s plenty of good literature that exists in pretty much ever written form.

(DIR) Post #B49Gyk9lpJI5ox7Mg4 by df@s.dfaria.eu
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@abucci The investment I was referring to was not the recent venture capital trend. What I had in mind was investment in artificial intelligence research, which has been a major academic and scientific endeavor since the 1950s, with pioneers such as Alan Turing laying the groundwork.

(DIR) Post #B49GykNazuLkVpaPE8 by df@s.dfaria.eu
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@abucci Current models are part of a long history of research in machine learning, computer science, and computational linguistics. Of course, there is marketing around it, but reducing the entire field to a passing marketing fad ignores decades of serious scientific work.

(DIR) Post #B49GykXWP0I10cEKhM by abucci@buc.ci
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@df@s.dfaria.eu @abucc I have a PhD in computer science and did research under the umbrella of AI. I have a decent sense of the state of the art. I stand by my earlier post. You are correct that there is intellectual investment in AI as well, but my own view is that a bunch of the so-called research is in fact fake, or if not fake then of dubious quality. Meanwhile, all the other diverse subareas of computer science continue just fine without LLMs and are able to prudce results with provable guarantees, something current LLMs cannot do and may never be able to do. So, again there is a fog of hype here that we need to pull our heads out of to see clearly.Regarding my claim that some of the research is fake, arXiv recently stopped accepting submissions to their computer science category because it was being overwhelmed with slop submissions and what amount to corporate whitepapers that would never hold up if submitted to a proper scientific journal. Nature Publishing Group, a formerly prestigious scientific publisher, has been horrible about promoting low-quality corporate marketing that pretends to be science. The money and marketing penetrates there too.

(DIR) Post #B49H0LYKH4l05mMsCG by A_denie@toot.io
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@Gargron about 3-6% of WORLD literature gets translated into English. They are absolutely missing out, but they&#39;ll rarely find out because they don&#39;t learn second languages either - let alone third or fourth ones.By African standards, Anglophones are almost illiterate. https://theconversation.com/africas-linguistic-diversity-goes-largely-unnoticed-in-research-on-multilingualism-208204

(DIR) Post #B49MFmhA8ne6O6gKjw by march38@mstdn.social
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@Gargron it has always been possible to make some money with bad translations (or bad code, etc.) long before LLMs. Now, it is possible to make much more money with them thanks to LLMs. So of course LLMs are here to stay.

(DIR) Post #B49Nen2c5jpCeeCd3A by bridgeenjoyer@gamepad.club
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@Gargron exactly. Bad tech is bad. Its not &quot;innovation&quot;. There is no innovation under late stage crony capitalism, only enshiffication until it ends.

(DIR) Post #B49Nx7rbPfbQRknOF6 by camertron@ruby.social
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@Gargron Sullivan&#39;s law states: &quot;A given person&#39;s willingness to use machine translation is inversely proportional to their knowledge of a second language.&quot;

(DIR) Post #B49PV92PeYPztAda4m by schlojj@openbiblio.social
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@Gargron but does it not also make sense to apply LLM to language(!) issues - rather than letting them solve tasks or do research? Of course we can all agree on literature, as translating a book is a creative process, but when it comes to information etc. I am really impressed by the progress machine translation has made in the romance languages that I speak fluently and I am using and recommending e.g. google translate for its dialogue functions for many interactions in our multilingual city

(DIR) Post #B49X4ETc7hmoZU2Shs by johnfocker@mamot.fr
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@Gargron There are also most probably ethical ways to produce and use them.Meanwhile, they&#39;re smarter and more humane than humans around me and I&#39;m not ready to give them up.

(DIR) Post #B49ZMx90zKEKE7SSeG by drq@mastodon.ml
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@Gargron

(DIR) Post #B49kjsCMdseh2k9l8y by IngaLovinde@embracing.space
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@Gabe_Fox @Gargron @aj in my childhood, I&#39;ve had (checks notes) five different full translations of LotR, and they were really different, and these are just the ones that tried to be faithful to the source material.

(DIR) Post #B49mthYvF3dErNWQiW by romeu@mastodon.social
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@Gargron the other day I was commenting that on a debate between a lawyer and a non-lawyer dude to that 100% believed, in a very arrogant manner, that LLMs could soon replace 100% of any and all lawyers at all skill levels once, and I quote, « we use AI to make laws so precise that every result can be calculated »I was awed at the levels of ignorance of what is even law.LLM lovers yearn for levels of oppression never seen. With a smooth brainess never beaten.

(DIR) Post #B49qzHM5zV6p8QRBU8 by tink@w3c.social
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@Meyerweb @Gargron Technology might not be inevitable but discrimination pretty much is, so please spare a thought for all the people who benefit from LLM because it enables us to overcome many of the human-made obstacles we encounter everyday.

(DIR) Post #B4A00RSUoPLcLY3oaO by Nawer_Rapter@mastodon.social
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@Gargron me, who has seen machine translations from japanese games from the past 10+ years on RPGmaker games: machine poetry is and will always be machine poetry.

(DIR) Post #B4ADAlL13S84IjoUdM by jake4480@c.im
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@Gargron BEST and only take we should have

(DIR) Post #B4ATODHu31mu17nESu by KayOhtie@blimps.xyz
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@Gargron I think one of the few translated books I can think of was the Three Body Problem books (before finding out about the author in more depth.)It was written very differently from English novels, but clearly done so with care. It had such a different voice to it, and that helped them stand out to me.I can&#39;t imagine flattening that out of them into traditional Western novel-styles. That&#39;s not to say Western novels can&#39;t be good, but this was very unique for me and I appreciated it.EDIT: And, importantly, it was hand-localized, not at all machine translated.

(DIR) Post #B4AsgPochr8YwCsF60 by hj@shigusegubu.club
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@drq @Gargron

(DIR) Post #B4B9fKgzxyrjyqNQzA by polkadots@mastodon.de
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@Gargron it&#39;s not even just garbage for literature. Most online shops nowadays have their sites machine translated and it sucks. Often there are words that have a specific meaning in that specific context but since it&#39;s an automatic translation, every word is translated in the most common meaning. It gets so bad that it&#39;s impossible to make any sense of a product description. Also, it makes the whole site appear cheap and shady, even if it&#39;s a renowned brand. The same applies to automatically translated articles and tutorials. It&#39;s just crap.

(DIR) Post #B4BC1TFJ2tbOms6lIu by farbenstau@infosec.exchange
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@Gargron DO NOT WANT

(DIR) Post #B4BWwvsLGw3XAb2nIW by murodegrizeco@toad.social
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@Gargron There was a science fiction story some years ago, by that druid fellow, Greer...He imagined a small post-American nation that, after being burnt badly before, carefully and thoughtfully chose what technologies they would embrace and use. Clothing that lasted. Streetcars. Newspapers. Wired analog phones. Choosing short sustainable supply chains. Refusing to use technologies with terrible unacknowledged &quot;externalities&quot;.They chose how to live. That was the interesting part!

(DIR) Post #B4FmlISbqryXdjJyMa by annehargreaves@ioc.exchange
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@Gargron Haha yes but the ppl who pay the translators think AI can do it. I lost my work as a result of automation (patent translation). Using machine translation as a tool is fine but like coding it needs to be in control of an experienced human.

(DIR) Post #B4Fn8aju3boAzWWAnQ by Christo_459@mastodon.me.uk
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@gargron I have read lots of books translated into English. I am very aware of good translations. The worst have been Icelandic thriller, very clunky. That said one more recently was much better

(DIR) Post #B4FtR4HHZY4ZXZKANM by brouhaha@mastodon.social
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@Gargron @df Yes. The flowchart has three boxes:1. Create LLM2. Then a miracle occurs3. Profit from AGI !!!The companies pushing so-called &quot;AI&quot; have completed step 1. Some of them try to tell us that they&#39;ve nearly got a handle on step 2, but that&#39;s just an attempt to swindle more investors. There is literally NOTHING that fits in the hole of step 2.

(DIR) Post #B4Fx5jDH5vuhweWtfs by df@s.dfaria.eu
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@abucci Right, I see your point. But what solution are you proposing? Banning the use of AI? Surely there must be other ways? We could try to educate people on the ethical and responsible use of AI...

(DIR) Post #B4Fx5jUI4fWanQUUCG by abucci@buc.ci
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@df@s.dfaria.eu Demanding that a person analyzing a situation should also immediately provide a solution does not make sense. Why are you making this demand? I am not a policymaker, nor a dictator. We should make this decision collectively, in a way that&#39;s fair and reasonable, while taking full account of the facts as we know them. One way of taking full account of the facts---and therefore making better decisions---is clearing away hype, mania, illusion, con artistry, etc., which is something I attempt to do.What&#39;s the problem with banning things? In the US we&#39;ve banned asbestos. We&#39;ve banned smoking cigarettes in certain locations. We ban dangerous things all the time. We ban unethical things too, for instance Ponzi schemes (in theory). If AI is irredeemably bad, why shouldn&#39;t we ban it? I don&#39;t know that it is, but why preemptively take that option off the table?In any case, if you&#39;re interested in &quot;ethical use of AI&quot;, how do you suggest it is possible to ethically use this technology? It&#39;s been built on stolen material and the labor of underpaid content taggers who now have PTSD from their work, and is repeatedly being promoted with lies. How is it ethical to use a technology that is causing people&#39;s electric bills to double or triple to pay for data centers, and that is causing water crises in an increasing number of towns across the US? Among other deep issues, such as being implicated in numerous assaults, murders, and suicides. As far as I can tell, as it&#39;s currently constituted (generative/LLM-based) AI is an ugly and destructive technology down to its very core, and it&#39;s hard to see how it can be used ethically unless one perverts the meaning of the word &quot;ethics&quot; so far that it becomes meaningless.

(DIR) Post #B4G3qQ6mXi6U1o8l4C by df@s.dfaria.eu
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@abucci I’m not making any demands. What I’m pushing back against is the tone of this recent wave of Mastodon posts, which seem to jump very quickly to blanket prohibition as the supposed “solution” to AI.Of course AI has risks and real problems. No serious person denies that. But proposing to simply ban AI is neither realistic nor particularly helpful. AI isn’t a single product or substance that can be neatly removed from society; it’s a broad set of techniques already embedded across science, medicine, infrastructure, and everyday software. Calling to ban it is like trying to stop the wind with your hands.The asbestos analogy doesn’t hold either. Asbestos is intrinsically harmful: its normal use causes serious health damage. AI is not that kind of thing. Treating them as equivalent is a false analogy. AI is much closer to a tool. Like a knife, it can be used harmfully or constructively. The ethical question is not whether the tool exists, but how it is built, governed, and used.You’re also presenting claims about “AI” being built on stolen material and exploited labor as if they applied to the entire field. Some of those criticisms are valid in specific cases, especially regarding certain corporate practices. But generalizing them to all AI development ignores the existence of university research, open-source projects, and systems trained on licensed or public datasets.What’s striking is that your argument completely ignores the positive applications that already exist: AI assisting medical diagnosis, enabling accessibility tools for disabled users, improving translation between languages, accelerating scientific research, helping analyze complex datasets, or supporting education. You may think some of those benefits are overstated, but pretending they don’t exist at all weakens your argument rather than strengthening it.If we want a serious ethical discussion, the relevant question isn’t “should we ban AI?” but which uses should be restricted or prohibited, and under what rules the rest should operate. That’s precisely the direction policymakers are taking, for example with the European Union AI Act @EUCommission which regulates AI according to risk levels and bans specific harmful uses rather than treating the entire technology as inherently illegitimate.

(DIR) Post #B4G3qQPvOXPqzB62u8 by abucci@buc.ci
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@df@s.dfaria.euWhat I’m pushing back against is the tone of this recent wave of Mastodon posts, which seem to jump very quickly to blanket prohibition as the supposed “solution” to AI.I made no such statement, and reading &quot;tone&quot; on the internet has been shown over and over again to be nearly impossible. It is quite odd for you to vent your frustrations at me over a perceived pattern on Mastodon, especially on a post of mine that is not exhibiting what you&#39;re frustrated about.But proposing to simply ban AI is neither realistic nor particularly helpful.Incorrect on both counts. As I suggested in my previous post, we have successfully banned products before that were found to be unacceptable. What&#39;s neither realistic nor helpful is this style of fatalism, arguing that something that&#39;s quite possible and has been done before is somehow not possible or realistic anymore.AI is much closer to a tool. Like a knife, it can be used harmfully or constructively.The AI at issue, LLM and image-based generative AI, represents a political project. That political project could be ended. &quot;It&#39;s just a tool&quot; is the cover story used by people unwilling to acknowledge the politics of it, or those who have an interest in furthering it without copping to it. It&#39;s the same form as the &quot;gun&#39;s don&#39;t kill people, people kill people&quot; argument we hear in the US every time someone shoots up a school, and is fallacious and ahistorical.You’re also presenting claims about “AI” being built on stolen material and exploited labor as if they applied to the entire field.You did catch the fact that I have a background in AI and do not need to be told things about my own field? I qualified one portion of my post with generative AI/LLMs. If you need me to label every single claim with the precise piece of technology I&#39;m referring to I can do that, but it seems ludicrous to me--clearly we are not discussing expert systems or case-based reasoning. Mastodon is not aflutter with posts about banning partial order planning. The discourse is about generative AI/LLMs, so for brevity I left off that qualifier in most places. I feel you&#39;re moving the goalposts in your attempt to argue with my non-argument.What’s striking is that your argument completely ignoresI am taking this to be trending into bad faith territory. I&#39;ve made no argument and am not looking for one, but you seem very keen on having one anyway. I&#39;ve pointed out known issues with generative AI/LLMs, made an aesthetic statement (&quot;AI is ugly&quot;), made a factual statement supported by evidence (&quot;AI is destructive&quot;), and stated I have difficulty seeing how this particular form of AI could be used ethically (a statement about my own shortcomings!). It&#39;s fine if you do not care about how I feel about generative AI, but it&#39;d help everyone if you read the words as saying what they were written to say instead of reading something different and seemingly agenda driven into them.enabling accessibility tools for disabled usersIt is deeply offensive to use disabled people as a pawn in an online dispute, and I will not take part in this. When I said that I thought AI is ugly, one of the many observations that led me to this conclusion is that people frequently say and do ugly things in support of it.improving translation between languagesCan be done without the current generation of LLMs or even AI, and better for non-English language pairs.accelerating scientific researchAI, and specifically LLMs, do not accelerate scientific research. This is hype. Nor is it desirable to do so, regardless of the method used. &quot;Slow science&quot; is something worth looking into if you haven&#39;t before.helping analyze complex datasetsHallucinations harm data analysis.supporting education.Available evidence strongly suggests use of digital technology in the classroom has significantly harmed education (e.g. Jared Horvath&#39;s testimony to the US Congress and his other work details these harms, which are serious and widespread). Available evidence also suggests that LLM technology in particular is having an even worse effect on education and learning.I believe that you are arguing with someone else, not me, and I find the direction you&#39;re going with your own arguments to be disturbing, so I am ending this interaction here.

(DIR) Post #B4H5DxuZKACmdgB8d6 by judy@ruby.social
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@Gargron the sad truth is: most people (I&#39;m including myself here) don&#39;t understand what makes good literature, music, art, etc.A very good friend of mine, who is not an musician, &quot;created&quot; a song with AI two weeks ago. It made her happy. My husband, who is not an app developer, created his own smartphone app yesterday. It made him very happy.