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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 subtit

• 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.
    • deleted 4y ago
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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.
• deleted 4y ago
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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.
  • deleted 4y ago
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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.