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AI permeated pretty much every business years ago with the advent of machine translation. It absolutely decimated the translation industry, because people who w

AI permeated pretty much every business years ago with the advent of machine translation. It absolutely decimated the translation industry, because people who want translation work done rarely have the skills necessary to tell the difference between the bad-but-free machine translations and the good-but-not-free human translations. Everyone loses - there are fewer translators now, the ones left find it harder to get work, and most people have to put up with understandable-but-mostly-terrible translated text. AI is technically amazing, but the short term impact is going to be to lower the quality of basically everything you can generate. People will struggle to compete on cost, and if the buyer doesn't know and appreciate the difference in quality they'll never buy from a person when they can generate something instead. I never really thought AI would be a serious threat to my job, but I'm starting to reconsider that now.

chpatrick 4y ago
I wouldn't say everyone loses. Being able to use foreign language websites and read documents is incredibly useful, and they don't need the world's best translation - although I would say the quality has been pretty decent recently. I'm sorry for translators but they're vastly outnumbered by people who find machine translation useful. If the choice is between finding a translator and paying them to be able to read something at all vs immediate free translation with the occasional mistake, I know which one I find more useful.
- onion2k 4y ago
  If the choice is between finding a translator and paying them to be able to read something at all vs immediate free translation with the occasional mistake, I know which one I find more useful. Yes, and that's how people will think about everything that can be generated by AI, from images to writing to music to code. People are very happy to accept a cheap-but-worse alternative. That that thought and apply it to what you do, and you'll see what the problem is.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    There isn't much of a market for shitty software though, if you are worse than Google people will just use Google etc.
    - onion2k 4y ago
      There isn't much of a market for shitty software though.. Are you sure? I mean ... gestures broadly at the software market
- kaashif 4y ago
  It's very, very surprising to me that that person has found a way to say that "everyone loses" with machine translation. If they wanted to look at a foreign website 30 years ago, what did they do? Call up a human translator and get them to translate? No, we just didn't read foreign language websites. For me, this is on par with arguing that English to foreign language dictionaries are bad, it's just ridiculous. Sorry if this comes across as too aggressive, I just come across this backlash against technology and labour-saving devices somewhat often, and it really confuses me.
  - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
    There weren’t even web sites 30 years ago, but yes to all of this.
    - joefourier 4y ago
      30 years ago was 1992 and the web was already a year old, so there were already a few websites, including some in Hebrew and French (although most were physics-related). Usenet itself is going to be 43 years old next year!
      - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
        Ah, I thought HTML was 94? I could have it wrong.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    Your post isn't aggressive at all. It's fine. If you look at machine translation in isolation you might actually be right. Perhaps we don't really need accurate translation at all, and translation jobs won't be missed, and having more-but-worse translation is a benefit of AI. But my point was more about using translation as an illustration of the impact of AI on an industry. In the case of translation there are maybe 5 or 10 percent of the translation jobs today than there were 20 years ago. Machine translation has decimated the translation industry. People are happy to have bad translations in order to save money. That is a pretty indisputable fact. My point is that this is likely to be the case for everything that you can generate with AI. If people will accept a slow, buggy, shitty app generated with AI because it saves them money then there is every chance that there could be 90% fewer devs in a couple of decades than there are now. It's hard to accept as a dev. I'd wager that if you'd told a translator back in 2002 that a computer will replace them in two decades they'd have had a hard time accepting it too.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  If the corpus of verified, good translations comes down hard then the ability of machine translation to improve much beyond its current state or to deal with language changes will be limited. The issue with things like machine translation is how to compensate the humans that fund and create the translations going into the machine - they are not redundant.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Also the translation really depends on the corpus. EU legislation and such is big input. But I'm not sure how well that covers many other cases. Or prose for example. Chinese/Korean->English is readable, but actually pretty horrid for artistic works. Not something you really want to read for pleasure.
mdp2021 4y ago
Only a few hours ago I found myself in front of a bad translation, accompanied to the product of a billionaire (who published a video in multiple versions, with translated embedded infographic text). A locution was employed which is used for something very different, and unironically (e.g., "With the departure of the CEO the company has lost his head" - to try and give the idea). This means that the bar for quality has fallen.
goombal 4y ago
Super interesting point, though it's important to note that this extends beyond text (which everyone is understandably focused on after ChatGPT's release). AI "art" (image gen) is also becoming more popular and lots of interesting business applications around marketing images and product listing images. One thing to note is if you look at something like Amazon where many listings have terrible images, using AI could actually improve them straight away by using some kind of Stable Diffusion / DreamBooth-type model with an API like https://dreamharbor.ai https://dreamharbor.ai For more generic images (e.g. for blog posts) where you just want "a dog sat on a cloud" then places like https://lexica.art https://lexica.art let you produce these images for free. The key with both of those is learning prompt engineering for which there are tonnes of resources - sites like https://prompthero.com/ https://prompthero.com/ are already getting involved in this space and on that dreamharbor site there's a pretty detailed blog post: https://blog.dreamharbor.ai/blog/how-to-write-prompt-stable-diffusion https://blog.dreamharbor.ai/blog/how-to-write-prompt-stable-... And then when it comes to video Synthensia is doing some very exciting work - but still some way to go. They could actually enhance international growth by providing better dubbing (potentially). Exciting times!
unhammer 4y ago
> [machine translation] absolutely decimated the translation industry Do you know of a good source for this? I've heard claims of this, but also claims of the opposite ("free MT leads to more communication across languages which leads to more need for high-quality translation"). But I've never seen any studies or hard numbers (or even anecdata from translators who lost their jobs – though I do know of translators who turned into MT post-editors), and my google scholar searches are turning up nothing.
- layer8 4y ago
  I know a freelance translator who basically gave up their work because (1) a steady decline in requests from clients and (2) it just doesn't pay enough anymore unless you rush every job by using DeepL and cutting corners on quality.

chpatrick 4y ago

I wouldn't say everyone loses. Being able to use foreign language websites and read documents is incredibly useful, and they don't need the world's best translation - although I would say the quality has been pretty decent recently. I'm sorry for translators but they're vastly outnumbered by people who find machine translation useful. If the choice is between finding a translator and paying them to be able to read something at all vs immediate free translation with the occasional mistake, I know which one I find more useful.

onion2k 4y ago
If the choice is between finding a translator and paying them to be able to read something at all vs immediate free translation with the occasional mistake, I know which one I find more useful. Yes, and that's how people will think about everything that can be generated by AI, from images to writing to music to code. People are very happy to accept a cheap-but-worse alternative. That that thought and apply it to what you do, and you'll see what the problem is.
- Jensson 4y ago
  There isn't much of a market for shitty software though, if you are worse than Google people will just use Google etc.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    There isn't much of a market for shitty software though.. Are you sure? I mean ... gestures broadly at the software market
kaashif 4y ago
It's very, very surprising to me that that person has found a way to say that "everyone loses" with machine translation. If they wanted to look at a foreign website 30 years ago, what did they do? Call up a human translator and get them to translate? No, we just didn't read foreign language websites. For me, this is on par with arguing that English to foreign language dictionaries are bad, it's just ridiculous. Sorry if this comes across as too aggressive, I just come across this backlash against technology and labour-saving devices somewhat often, and it really confuses me.
- AgentOrange1234 4y ago
  There weren’t even web sites 30 years ago, but yes to all of this.
  - joefourier 4y ago
    30 years ago was 1992 and the web was already a year old, so there were already a few websites, including some in Hebrew and French (although most were physics-related). Usenet itself is going to be 43 years old next year!
    - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
      Ah, I thought HTML was 94? I could have it wrong.
- onion2k 4y ago
  Your post isn't aggressive at all. It's fine. If you look at machine translation in isolation you might actually be right. Perhaps we don't really need accurate translation at all, and translation jobs won't be missed, and having more-but-worse translation is a benefit of AI. But my point was more about using translation as an illustration of the impact of AI on an industry. In the case of translation there are maybe 5 or 10 percent of the translation jobs today than there were 20 years ago. Machine translation has decimated the translation industry. People are happy to have bad translations in order to save money. That is a pretty indisputable fact. My point is that this is likely to be the case for everything that you can generate with AI. If people will accept a slow, buggy, shitty app generated with AI because it saves them money then there is every chance that there could be 90% fewer devs in a couple of decades than there are now. It's hard to accept as a dev. I'd wager that if you'd told a translator back in 2002 that a computer will replace them in two decades they'd have had a hard time accepting it too.
RandomLensman 4y ago
If the corpus of verified, good translations comes down hard then the ability of machine translation to improve much beyond its current state or to deal with language changes will be limited. The issue with things like machine translation is how to compensate the humans that fund and create the translations going into the machine - they are not redundant.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Also the translation really depends on the corpus. EU legislation and such is big input. But I'm not sure how well that covers many other cases. Or prose for example. Chinese/Korean->English is readable, but actually pretty horrid for artistic works. Not something you really want to read for pleasure.

mdp2021 4y ago

Only a few hours ago I found myself in front of a bad translation, accompanied to the product of a billionaire (who published a video in multiple versions, with translated embedded infographic text). A locution was employed which is used for something very different, and unironically (e.g., "With the departure of the CEO the company has lost his head" - to try and give the idea). This means that the bar for quality has fallen.

goombal 4y ago

Super interesting point, though it's important to note that this extends beyond text (which everyone is understandably focused on after ChatGPT's release). AI "art" (image gen) is also becoming more popular and lots of interesting business applications around marketing images and product listing images. One thing to note is if you look at something like Amazon where many listings have terrible images, using AI could actually improve them straight away by using some kind of Stable Diffusion / DreamBooth-type model with an API like https://dreamharbor.ai https://dreamharbor.ai For more generic images (e.g. for blog posts) where you just want "a dog sat on a cloud" then places like https://lexica.art https://lexica.art let you produce these images for free. The key with both of those is learning prompt engineering for which there are tonnes of resources - sites like https://prompthero.com/ https://prompthero.com/ are already getting involved in this space and on that dreamharbor site there's a pretty detailed blog post: https://blog.dreamharbor.ai/blog/how-to-write-prompt-stable-diffusion https://blog.dreamharbor.ai/blog/how-to-write-prompt-stable-... And then when it comes to video Synthensia is doing some very exciting work - but still some way to go. They could actually enhance international growth by providing better dubbing (potentially). Exciting times!

unhammer 4y ago

> [machine translation] absolutely decimated the translation industry Do you know of a good source for this? I've heard claims of this, but also claims of the opposite ("free MT leads to more communication across languages which leads to more need for high-quality translation"). But I've never seen any studies or hard numbers (or even anecdata from translators who lost their jobs – though I do know of translators who turned into MT post-editors), and my google scholar searches are turning up nothing.

layer8 4y ago
I know a freelance translator who basically gave up their work because (1) a steady decline in requests from clients and (2) it just doesn't pay enough anymore unless you rush every job by using DeepL and cutting corners on quality.