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It's clear that the system occasionally struggles in making coherent sentences that communicate actual meaning -- others have pointed this out well enough. I th

It's clear that the system occasionally struggles in making coherent sentences that communicate actual meaning -- others have pointed this out well enough. I think what's occasionally lost in these types of criticisms of these systems is the point the article is making about the transformation of the role of the writer from a producer to a curator. Already this transformation has occured in other fields; the job of a professional translator (for text) at this point is mostly starting with a machine translation and slightly tweaking it in order to produce something more natural. I can easily see this happening with GPT-N: the writer inputs some ideas, and filters what's produced and/or tweaks it to make the final product. It doesn't matter if X% of what it produces is trash: if there is usable content, the role of the writer has been changed. If the machine produces something like the article's examples on the first go, and all the "writer" needs to do is tweak it a bit to modify the bit about throwing babies in the trash, then it is still groundbreaking.

groby_b 5y ago
> the job of a professional translator (for text) at this point is mostly starting with a machine translation and slightly tweaking it in order to produce something more natural. Not really, no. That might be true for instruction booklet translation (they sure read like it), but no, for a decent translation, you'll need to let a human have a full go at it. Writing is as much about filtering & tweaking GPT-3 output as sculpting is about "removing everything that doesn't look like the final sculpture", as the old adage goes. It is useful for one purpose: To do an absolutely minimal job and to externalize some more work onto end users. It'll also be popular for spam^W SEO, and for writing filler content for content graveyards. It will not, however, be useful for writing. I have no doubt that we'll see a lot more tooling supporting writing, and machine-assisted writing. I have equally no doubt that GPT-3 and friends aren't going to be it.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Sure, "decent" translation as in novels etc will continue to be hand-crafted, but the vast majority of translation is low-end bulk stuff like business reports and technical documentation, paid pennies per word. I know one (former) professional translator, and dumping text into Google Translate was always her starting point. Interestingly, her job got harder when Google rolled out the new deep learning models, because instead of outputting visibly broken garbage that kind of flagged itself for checking, it now tends to produce beautifully formed sentences with subtle but often critical fuckups (wrong sense of a word, missing negation, parsing a pronoun incorrectly, etc) that can affect meaning.
barry-cotter 5y ago
> Already this transformation has occured in other fields; the job of a professional translator (for text) at this point is mostly starting with a machine translation and slightly tweaking it in order to produce something more natural. That certainly isn’t the case for Chinese-English translation. It’s faster to translate from scratch than to edit machine translated text if you know what your doing and have quality standards. One of my friends did German-English translation and machine translation just isn’t for purpose there either if you have any real quality standards. You can’t skip the part where you know what’s going on.
falsaberN1 5y ago
A friend of mine is a Japanese person who translates Japanese<>English stuff and machine translation is absolutely unthinkable there, and would take much longer to "tweak" into something that works. It's no wonder there's high demand for people like him.

groby_b 5y ago

> the job of a professional translator (for text) at this point is mostly starting with a machine translation and slightly tweaking it in order to produce something more natural. Not really, no. That might be true for instruction booklet translation (they sure read like it), but no, for a decent translation, you'll need to let a human have a full go at it. Writing is as much about filtering & tweaking GPT-3 output as sculpting is about "removing everything that doesn't look like the final sculpture", as the old adage goes. It is useful for one purpose: To do an absolutely minimal job and to externalize some more work onto end users. It'll also be popular for spam^W SEO, and for writing filler content for content graveyards. It will not, however, be useful for writing. I have no doubt that we'll see a lot more tooling supporting writing, and machine-assisted writing. I have equally no doubt that GPT-3 and friends aren't going to be it.

Clewza313 5y ago
Sure, "decent" translation as in novels etc will continue to be hand-crafted, but the vast majority of translation is low-end bulk stuff like business reports and technical documentation, paid pennies per word. I know one (former) professional translator, and dumping text into Google Translate was always her starting point. Interestingly, her job got harder when Google rolled out the new deep learning models, because instead of outputting visibly broken garbage that kind of flagged itself for checking, it now tends to produce beautifully formed sentences with subtle but often critical fuckups (wrong sense of a word, missing negation, parsing a pronoun incorrectly, etc) that can affect meaning.

barry-cotter 5y ago

> Already this transformation has occured in other fields; the job of a professional translator (for text) at this point is mostly starting with a machine translation and slightly tweaking it in order to produce something more natural. That certainly isn’t the case for Chinese-English translation. It’s faster to translate from scratch than to edit machine translated text if you know what your doing and have quality standards. One of my friends did German-English translation and machine translation just isn’t for purpose there either if you have any real quality standards. You can’t skip the part where you know what’s going on.

falsaberN1 5y ago

A friend of mine is a Japanese person who translates Japanese<>English stuff and machine translation is absolutely unthinkable there, and would take much longer to "tweak" into something that works. It's no wonder there's high demand for people like him.