15 ms·

I'm less worried about stuff like ChatGPT killing things off, but more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse. To take an analogy: bad voice recog

• heavyset_go 4y ago
  Subtitles got noticably worse now that their generation is often farmed out to AI, especially in translations. Drives me nuts as someone who likes using subtitles.
  • Mechanical9 4y ago
    Huh, that hasn't been my experience, at least not yet. Are you talking about newer movies and shows?
    • heavyset_go 4y ago
      Mostly videos I stream online. YouTube is a good example, but I've noticed an uptick in bad subtitles on other streaming platforms that stream content with higher production values.
      • jewelry 4y ago
        I remember a while ago American shows and movies joked about Indian customer support, as they "lower the standard of customer service". Now here the same to AI "lower the standard of subtitle". The quality is not appreciated which is why the offering are lower the bar for quality constantly. Or they'll be out competed.
        • mschuster91 4y ago
          The sad thing is, AI could be used in a clever way - have AI do the large amount of leg work in transcription, and have a human refine that.
          • ghaff 4y ago
            Maybe. But at least today my experience is that AI podcast transcription with good audio is off enough that I only use it to check quotes or pick out short excerpts. If I'm going to publish a full transcription, I'll just have a human do it. Not clear to me if it's faster for someone who does that sort of thing to be making a lot of corrections as opposed to just transcribing--though it will get there.
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      • Semaphor 4y ago
        English dubbed English subs are completely different, the subs (presumably) being translations of the original language instead of the dubs. It's very jarring and I can only imagine this getting better with AI.
    • KevinGlass 4y ago
      Sometime last year, someone published a guide on auto-generating subtitles using an emacs plugin and WhisperAI. A lot of anime release groups use it so they can get an English subtitled version of a show released a couple hours after it airs in Japan. It's nice to have access sooner, especially for less popular shows that might never get any kind of release outside of Japan, but it's a lot worse then most fan subs and sometimes misses entire sections of dialog.
      • amalcon 4y ago
        That scene has long had the "janky but really fast translation" niche and the "good but takes a couple of days" niche. From what little I experienced of the former, people who cared about translation quality probably weren't using it anyway. I've been away from all that for rather a long time, so I don't know. Still, I'd guess these robo-subtitles are probably replacing the "fast and bad" niche. The "slow and good" niche seems like it could survive.
        • sireat 4y ago
          Looks like anime fansubbing scene has not changed much in the 30 years. Back then there were multiple fansubber camps - notably Artic Animation which fell into "janky but really fast translation" releasing many shows and purist fansubbers who released maybe a few titles a year but with extremely high quality subs. Then you had extremists who demanded no subs whatsoever and then those who preferred commercial dubs...
      • thanatropism 4y ago
        I've been getting the advice (but I'm learning German, not Japanese) that the best thing is to watch shows with subtitles in the foreign language to gradually acquire it.
      • Oxidation 4y ago
        Lots of Chinese dramas with barely-parseable subtitles as well. Missing sections, and completely wrong contextual glosses, which are particularly easy to get horribly wrong in Chinese.
    • abracadaniel 4y ago
      The subtitles I've seen come out of Whisper have been astounding. Dealing with heavy accents, and stammering without trouble. Current youtube auto CC is pretty bad, but the current gen AI is really impressive.
    • broast 4y ago
      I experienced this with older shows on Amazon
    • eatsyourtacos 4y ago
      I've been rewatching some Star Trek Voyager on paramount+ and there is no way a person did all the subtitles. It's like 98% accurate, I'll give it that. But there are enough glaring mistakes that there's just no way a person would have made those kind of mistakes and also they are easily catchable if a single person were to proofread.
      • sillysaurusx 4y ago
        Paramount+ sucks. If you try to play DS9 season 5 episode 1, it simply throws an error. So all legal option for watching that episode is gone. (I’m almost ashamed I watch Star Trek so often that I know this offhand…) The subtitles are literally the worst, short of being incomprehensible. Like so bad that until someone experiences them, you can’t really grok how terrible they are. They’re a solid D minus. Maybe it‘s an iOS thing. But every so often, the positioning codes sneak in to the subtitles themselves, so you start seeing x,y coordinates. And any time anything is italicized, the italicized part jumps to the opposite side of the screen, meaning the caption gets split in half. It’d be comical if it wasn’t frustrating. (Thanks for the opportunity to vent about how sad it is that Star Trek is trapped behind such a bad streaming service. And I even pay for no ads, yet they still show ads every 8th episode or so.)
        • eatsyourtacos 4y ago
          I agree Paramount+ is my least favorite streaming service. It never seems to remember what I was watching or where I am in an episode. Subtitles are not something I normally have on since I know almost every word verbatim for stng and voyager... so maybe they are even worse than I realize! I only pay for this service because I want to support my beloved star trek.. glad it's been getting some new life in recent years at least! But yes.. it's sad that they have such a crappy service.
      • sumtechguy 4y ago
        Subtitle mistakes are very common. I have tons of DVD's from before AI. The subtitles have tons of obvious errors. I doubt they re-subtitled it, thought they may have run it thru a generic AI? They probably took whatever was there and just dumped it onto the service. Some are even more fun in that they will have 3 generations of subtitles all on one disc. The TV CC fit into the vertical blank, the dvd subtitle, and the for the hearing impaired subtitle. I usually go for the hearing impaired ones. As they seem to be the most accurate, and usually have a nice bonus of putting the text over/near the person who is actually speaking. Which is nice for when chars on the show overtalk each other. A fun touch was on the toy story ones they used the font from the title cards as the font for the subtitles.
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  • joshstrange 4y ago
    And in return I can get subtitles on literally everything I want now instead of hoping the creator added them. I have no doubt that some places that were paying for transcription decided to go to AI/ML route but for every 1-2 of those there have have to be thousands of examples of subtitles existing where they never would have before. I always have YT's subtitles turned on and while they aren't perfect they are way better than the alternative (none). Network/Streaming TV/Movies should absolutely be paying someone to, at a minimum, clean up the first pass by AI and we should demand that but I'm not at all ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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    • badcppdev 4y ago
      I have observed subtitles with mistakes that change the meaning to the exact opposite! On a video about the supply lines of components for a particular approach to fusion. Single word change which meant the CEO was saying his company wouldn't work. Are you sure you don't want to throw the navy out with the bathwater?
      • Sai_ 4y ago
        > the navy out with the bathwater? I realise it is not good HN form to talk about the comment instead of adding to the conversation but the subtlety with which you injected this was brilliant. I was ready to ignore the change as human error/typo until it hit me. Point about AI driven subtitling very well made!
  • low_common 4y ago
    Subtitles have never been better idk what you're smoking
  • grogenaut 4y ago
    I've worked tangentally to some of the orgs trying to do these types of things. Having a person review everything especially when some titles are only up for 3 to 6 months and they only get a few days notice is really difficult. Public numbers for prime is around 60,000 titles in 2021. Those are most likely going to be in four languages. And there's going to be at least two versions of each of those depending on what regions are playing in. That also assumes that a title is only one piece of content not a TV show if we assume that 50% of the titles are TV shows and each of those has a minimum of 10 episodes and we assume every title is around an hour including movies so that'll average out with shorter shows longer shows and longer movies. That ends up being around 4.8 million hours worth of content. Let's just assume that the rate of title entry is one-to-one with the length of content though it's much more likely 1.5 to 1 or 2 to 1 given that people have to pause go back and fix things. That gives us with the average worker working 2,000 hours a year 2400 person years to data enter the entire catalog. Manual entry also obviously leaves rooms for poor workers or fat fingering. So if you wanted really high quality you would spot check other workers and so you might bloat that up to 3,000 people years. So if you hired a brand new team of unskilled workers train them for 6 months with 3,000 people and then spent them for a year you would be able to backfill all of Prime's catalog right now. But what happens when you on board say 10,000 titles from getting a new licensing deal with searchlight films? You want that content up as fast as possible and people actually like it less if it doesn't have titles on it then if they're bad as some other comments have said. Also just running the numbers let's say you pay someone around $30,000 a year to do this data entry at a very low wage double that for facilities and support HR and all that crap. 3000 employees at that wage for a year is 180 million. That training alone is 90M. Should each of the streaming services take a large chunk of their budget just to make sure that a human reviews the subtitles possibly at an accuracy rate only slightly higher than the machine learning can do currently. Would you rather have 5% human coverage or 100% 90% accurate AI coverage. From my understanding most content doesn't actually have subtitles on it unless it was on a premiere TV network that was required for government regulations to subtitle their shows such as a BBC TV show. That means that the streaming networks are actually doing this out of customer interest as opposed to being required to do so so they're actually backfilling work for the people that produce the videos in the first place. And from the little bit that I've worked in broadcast subtitles sharing isn't all that standard and Netflix for instance may have added subtitles but that doesn't mean that prime video or Hulu is going to get those subtitles if they take on that content later the video producers aren't that interested in pulling the information back into their catalog they don't have the tech support to do stuff like that. Also almost all of this was dictated via Google voice AKA subtitles via ai and the only mistake I noticed was it didn't understand tangently it instead put 10 generally.
• jasonjei 4y ago
  > To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. I had to go through hoops talking to the Doordash bot to get a change to my order. And I pray for the poor soul that runs afoul of Google…
• nordsieck 4y ago
  > bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. This one really puzzles me. Voice recognition replaced phone trees. And from what I can tell, it's just worse. In this particular use case I don't think it really replaced tier 1 support. Either I'm missing something that it's a lot better for some group(s) of people, or people adopted it because of promises that failed to materialize.
  • devoutsalsa 4y ago
    I just keep pressing 0 until a live person answers.
    • fatnoah 4y ago
      I double down and press 0 while shouting "Agent!"
      • ehPReth 4y ago
        there’s a rumour that cursing can also help you get to the operator (faster?). not sure how true that is, though
    • kloch 4y ago
      "Representative! ... Representative! ... Representative!"
    • amelius 4y ago
      You should automate that.
    • onemoresoop 4y ago
      If too many people do that they will turn it off, just a few representatives cannot handle such inflow of requests. The problem is skimping on customer service personnel. I could see it saying "I understand you want to reach customer representative", "Please select from these options while I connect you to a representative" while circling you around a graph of options or just automatically hanging up after 45 minutes to an hour of being on the call.
• bobleeswagger 4y ago
  > more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse. Hit the nail on the head. ChatGPT will replace the wrong things, and probably create a world where we still need to solve problems ChatGPT has become attached to. It's all noise, I can't perceive a signal at this point.
  • alkjsdlkjasd 4y ago
    It's just good at writing, it's contextual understanding is bad (at first). But give it context and it flies. Ask it to write a cover letter for an engineering role, it will turn out mediocre crap. Give it the actual role and your CV in the prompts, you're pretty much good to go. It's unique, you still control the narrative (please highlight my ability to work under pressure) and it's done in 10 secs. I really don't see what isn't to love about that. Also it usually writes better if you tell to write well.
• bulgur 4y ago
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  • telotortium 4y ago
    I like mchurch, and I think he'll be safe from AI, since the context window needs to increase exponentially in size in order to accommodate an mchurch-style doorstopper.
  • conviencefee999 4y ago
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  • namaria 4y ago
    It's only true literature if it's spawned by neuron networks bred inside the skulls of free ranging apes. When it comes from simulated neuron networks built by software in datacenters it's just sparkling copy.
• dv_dt 4y ago
  ChatGPT is basically automated reversion to a slightly worse mean for applicable areas. The algos as sophisticated as they are produce a credible remix of the training input.
  • alkjsdlkjasd 4y ago
    But just give it context about what you want it to write and it will write about it. Obviously this is much easier if you have an existing body of work but you can still write to ChatGPT clumsily and it will often turn what you are trying to say into better prose. My analogy is that it is to writing what the spell checker is to spelling. Very few people in the world have to be good at spelling anymore. Yeah everyone is okay, but it's not as valued a skill as it used to be. ChatGPT is doing the same for writing. Yes you need to be able to write to an okay level but you don't need to be able to write well, ChatGPT does that.
    • dv_dt 4y ago
      The question is how many times will it elevating bad prose vs removing opportunities to write great prose.
• dgb23 4y ago
  When everything will suck a bit more in the future, will it then recursively suck even more over time given that AI feeds itself content?
• tetraodonpuffer 4y ago
  Trading quality for price has been happening everywhere for long enough that it is easy to see how unfortunately it will now play out in the arts as well. I mean, not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor, all the music you listened to was played live by musicians, all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors: now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents. ChatGPT, stable diffusion and I am sure upcoming music models will enable this mechanization in the arts, where great artists will be unaffected but making it nearly impossible for “good enough” artists to compete while also pushing up the floor of what is an acceptable competency level that merits being paid for making it more difficult for people to support themselves while improving their skills.
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    Yep. Recording and photography killed almost all the value (social and financial) of middling artistic talent in music, storytelling, and visual arts, which may well have been what gave a lot of people a significant part of their sense of self-worth before that—plus, maybe, some income. Now AI's coming for most of those who survived that first culling. And not just the middling-talent folks this time.
    • Gare 4y ago
      Most people can't afford top talent to play live music at their wedding or photograph it.
      • apocalypstyx 4y ago
        I'm sort of sick of the top talent argument. My grandfather and group sang. From what tapes I have heard of them, they didn't sound worse than any other group of Appalachian gospel/blue grass singers. My parents' wedding photos weren't 'professional' and I think they came out pretty well, perhaps even charming. Sometimes I think people are putting too much stock in the notion of a 'perfect' life, rather than a lived one.
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• fhd2 4y ago
  I have the same worry. Another example: Is furniture nowadays more beautiful and durable than it used to be 100 years ago? Is there more variety now? Not in my book. Same goes for a lot of products that are now produced in the cheapest way possible at scale. Looks very much like a race to the bottom dominated by a few big players to me. Consumers don't seem to care that much.
  • bluGill 4y ago
    Does it matter? There is a lot of 100 year old furniture out there that nobody wants. They don't fit modern lifestyles. 100 year houses are only livable because someone put a ton of money into retrofitting things like plumbing, electric, and HVAC. Most of that has had major rework done several times as well since it was first added. Even at that, the fundamentals of those houses mean that they cannot be retrofitting for good insulation, and it can be argued they should all be scrapped for that reason.
    • stereolambda 4y ago
      I would say more tastes than lifestyles. You can use old wardrobes, drawers etc. just fine. It's just that people are used to looking at vaguely modern (often bland and disposable) stuff from the media, and at least think other people would think them weird and nonconforming for using old furniture. Even if you can get it relatively cheap, which is suggested by the "no one wants it" phrase. I think there is an ethos of buying new and overpriced (and also buying "experiences") to show off that you have money for that and aren't some poor nerd trying to optimize their budget at the expense of consumerism. Often you don't actually have that much money for actual conspicuous consumption, so at least you're trying to imitate the Apple aesthetic. I am getting this vibe from talking to a distinct set of people of my age group, of course not all.
      • throwaway492338 4y ago
        A different take on lifestyles: unfortunately there's a big gap in convenience between being able to move across the world and get everything you need in one afternoon in IKEA, and tracking it all down second hand.
• alkjsdlkjasd 4y ago
  Maybe let's wait until people get good at using it? It's been like a 1.5 months since it was released. For me I am doing a lot my writing with it becuase my writing is worse than mediocre. As long as you don't expect it to know things off the bat, it has a decent memory, though seems to be unaware of what it knows e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34370057) So you can just feed it the good info, get it to update things with more context and it will spit out pretty decent prose (though you have to ask to for it to be well written).
• pajuc 4y ago
  True, and this has real effects on jobs. There was a similar dynamic with translation market and Google Translate. It didn't matter that human translation was superior. What mattered was that Google Translate (or similar) brought down prices so much that it effectively destroyed the market for everyday-type of translations. Why? Because customers said that, well, just use Google Translate and then improve it a bit.
• adelie 4y ago
  you definitely see this in the translation industry. neural net machine translation misses enough nuance that it can't replace a human translator where it really matters, but it 'looks right' enough to convince clients that it can. as a result, it's a lot harder to make a living as a freelance translator these days - there are fewer jobs and what jobs exist are often proofreading machine translations, which command lower rates because 'the machine did most of the work already,' even though they often require full rewrites. at the same time, human translation quality has gone down too, since a lot of people will pass off machine translation as their own work, and when rates are too low, you can't spend too much time on any particular job.
• thanatropism 4y ago
  This is an old concern (and nevertheless a good one): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Techno...
  • beepbooptheory 4y ago
    Haha, its true but I feel like GP's thought stops way short of Heidegger's. Products we buy being a little worse because of the necessities of capitalism (or whatever you'd rather say) is small change compared to the very essence of Being getting enframed into total occlusion. That is, I don't know if I would say getting frustrated by an automated voice system is the same thing as a hammer breaking for your given Dasein, but one could make the argument I bet.
• steve76 4y ago
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• xorcist 4y ago
  > allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service Does it, really? I find that most of the time that while people can spot the difference between facts and a sales pitch, repeating the pitch enough still changes the common discourse. People can say things like "technology x may be more expensive but saves development time" (where X can be anything from the latest frontend framework to microservices to voice recognition) while in fact there is no data that it saves any development time at all. Is it even true that voice recognition reduces the amount of customer service compared to a simple menu system? If it isn't, the premise doesn't hold.
• JL-Akrasia 4y ago
  This is a really bad take. 1. Creativity can be achieved at faster speeds than humans can consume. 2. We have no evidence to say AI and the techniques behind it wont keep improving (there are already so many low hanging fruits, alot of it is infra problems and the other half that we can't even imagine can probably be solved by AI better than humans can)
• chrisweekly 4y ago
  There's also the fundamental problem of AI-generated content "polluting" the training data, right?
• throwaway5371 4y ago
  most marketing copy is now written by mediocre humans who are much worse than mediocre ai
• polishdude20 4y ago
  Also, how do you continue to train a model like this when everywhere you look is just output from the same model? Like, at some point, the real conversations and text gets overwhelmed by the fake stuff. Where does the model pull more training data from?
• jredwards 4y ago
  Turn it on its head, then. We can build bots which navigate bad customer service portals on your behalf.