3 ms·
This seems like what xkcd called "citogenesis" - something inaccurate gets published on Wikipedia, a traditional "reliable source" (newspaper, published nonfict
by geofft 6y ago
This seems like what xkcd called "citogenesis" - something inaccurate gets published on Wikipedia, a traditional "reliable source" (newspaper, published nonfiction book, etc.) retells that bit of information without a source, Wikipedia cites the source, that information is now firmly established as truth for the rest of humanity.
I worry about this with Google's language translation models, too. It's entirely possible that it's making up phrases or connotations that never existed in organic human speech, but people who aren't fully fluent in the language use Google Translate for assistance, publish something, and then suddenly it's in a published text by an actual human and Google reinforces its own belief.
For at least the past five years, Google Translate has translated "who proceeds from the father" into Latin as "qui ex patre filioque procedit" - inserting the additional word "filioque," which means "and the son." The question of whether to add this word is a 1500-year-old theological argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filioque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filioque Since the Western Church added the word, most texts in Latin include it, so Google is almost certainly deciding that the phrasing with "filioque" is more popular - but it doesn't know what the words mean, so it can't realize that the phrase it came up with means something different!
- xapata 6y agoI met an artist whose body of work consisted of citogenisis. He'd been at it for a decade when I met him, and had created at least a dozen fictional artists, detailed biographies, and a complete "retrospective" gallery show for each. This let him copy the styles of the great masters of different periods, yet make something new, of a sort. He never edited Wikipedia himself, but instead led gallery tours of these retrospectives and was always overjoyed when people would write about them, propagating the fiction.
- gugagore 6y agoThis is an issue solvable with better provenance / data lineage, which has come up in recent HN discussions.
- geofft 6y agoHow do you enforce that other people provide provenance on text? Taking the translation example - how do you enforce that users of Google Translate keep provenance in their translated text that remains with the text?
- jacobolus 6y agoGoogle Translate's Latin translations are just a short markov model. https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/comments/6akqdi/why_is_google_translate_so_bad_for_latin_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/comments/6akqdi/why_is_google... Translation for many (most?) other languages does something more sophisticated.
- skissane 6y agoI really wish someone would come up with some better Latin translation software/service. Google Translate is so bad for Latin it is close to useless.
- geofft 6y agoIf I'm reading that post right, Latin and other languages all use the same model, they just have more training data for more common pairs of languages.
- jacobolus 6y agoThey use some kind of neural net thing for other languages. e.g. here is a paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144 https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144
- LdSGSgvupDV 6y agoSounds like a kind of cyber-meme?