7 ms·

Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

171 points by veqq 1y ago

pavel_lishin 1y ago
> The initial draft was terrible in conveying tone, irony, or any kind of cultural allusion. My mother reads books mostly in Russian, including books by English-speaking authors translated into Russian. Some of the translations are laughably bad; one recent example had to translate "hot MILF", and just translated "hot" verbatim - as in the adjective indicating temperature - and just transliterated the word "MILF", as the translator (or machine?) apparently just had no idea what it was, and didn't know the equivalent term in Russian. As a mirror, I have a hard time reading things in Russian - I left when I was ten years old, so I'm very out of practice, and most of the cultural allusions go straight over my head as well. A good translation needs to make those things clear, either via a good translation, or by footnotes that explain things to the reader. And this doesn't just apply to linguistic translation - the past is a foreign country, too. Reading old texts - any old texts - requires context.
- notpushkin 1y ago
  As a Russian, горячая милфа is exactly how I’d translate it. I think a lot of slang got borrowed like this in 2000-s.
  - smsm42 1y ago
    A substantial portion of modern Russian slang is borrowed from hilariously badly translated western movies or games or songs, and then the terms just stayed around, because there wasn't any better alternative.
- incone123 1y ago
  Reminds me of my Czech friend explaining some of the subtle humour in 'Kolya' which I would never have got just from the English subtitles.
- Joker_vD 1y ago
  > and just translated "hot" verbatim - as in the adjective indicating temperature Well, "горячий" does have figurative meaning "passionate" (and by transfer, "sexy") in Russian just as it has in English. Heck, English is even worse in this regard: "heated argument", seriously? Not only an argument doesn't have a temperature, you can't change it either (since it does not exist)! Yet the phrase exists just fine, and it translates as "hot argument" to Russian, no problem. No comments on "MILF" though. But I wouldn't be surprised if it actually entered the (youth/Internet) slang as-is: many other English words did as well.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  A lot of commercial translations of foreign books are out of date. The ones sold in stores use translations that are > 100 years old because then they are public domain and they don't have to pay any royalties to anyone. I can highly recommend anyone who is looking to read a foreign book research the translation before they buy it. Some awesome modern translations don't bubble up in the searches because their sales are much lower than the cheaper versions.
masfuerte 1y ago
> Still, without AI a story like this would have taken me several weeks to translate and polish, instead of one afternoon. I don't understand this. It's only six thousand words and it's the polishing that takes the time. How would it have taken weeks to do the initial draft?
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  I suppose different people work differently and the author knows themselves better than we do?
- WastedCucumber 1y ago
  Maybe he's... not great at Russian? I'm at a loss, same as you. And I don't have any skill in Russian, but I would say that his translation is not good, or at least was not thoughtfully made, based solely on the fact that he did not write the author's name in it.
  - shaky 1y ago
    I don't understand: the translation is not good because he omitted the author's name? He stated it plainly in his article: > As it happens, I recently translated a short story by Kir Bulychev — a Soviet science-fiction icon virtually unknown in the West. I for one enjoyed reading it! As for the article, it's on point. There will be fewer historians and translators, but I suspect those that stick around will be greatly amplified.
    - chupasaurus 1y ago
      > I for one enjoyed reading it! I gave a quick look and was surprised to see that the most of the first two paragraphs simply aren't there. I guess you've read something else! As for machine translation: currently it isn't remotely ready to deal with literature by itself, but it could be handy to assist translators.
    - WastedCucumber 1y ago
      In the PDF linked in the article there's only the title of the story, and not the author's name.
glenstein 1y ago
I agree and disagree. It's certainly the case that facts imply underlying epistemologies, but it completely misses the point to treat that like it entails catastrophic relativism. Building up an epistemology isn't just recreational, ideally it's done for good reasons that are responsive to scrunity, standing firm on important principles and, where necessarily, conciliatory in response to epistemological conundrums. In short, such theories can be resilient and responsible, and facts based on them can inherent that resilience. So I think it completely misses the point to think that "facts imply epistemologies" should have the upshot of destroying any conception of access to authoritative factual understanding. Global warming is still real, vaccines are still effective, sunscreen works, dinosaurs really existed. And perhaps, more to the point in this context, there really are better and worse understandings of the fall of Rome or the Dark Ages or Pompeii or the Iraq war. If being accountable to the theory-laden epistemic status of facts means throwing the stability of our historical understanding into question, you're doing it wrong. And, as it relates to the article, you're doing it super wrong if you think that creates an opening for a notion of human intuition that is fundamentally non-informational. I think it's definitely true that AI as it currently exists can spew out linguistically flat translations, lacking such things as an interpretive touch, or an implicit literary and cultural curiosity that breathes the fire of life and meaning into language as it is actually experienced by humans. That's a great and necessary criticism. But. Hubert Dreyfus spent decades insisting that there were things "computers can't do", and that those things were represented by magical undefined terms that speak to ineffable human essence. He insisted, for instance, that computers performing chess at a high level would never happen because it required "insight", and he felt similarly about the kind of linguistic comprehension that has now, at least in part, been achieved by LLMs. LLMs still fall short in critical ways, and losing sight of that would involve letting go of our ability to appreciate the best human work in (say) history, or linguistics. And there's a real risk that "good enough" AI can cause us to lose touch with such distinctions. But I don't think it follows that you have to draw a categorical line insisting such understanding is impossible, and in fact I would suggest that's a tragic misunderstanding that gets everything exactly backwards.
- mapontosevenths 1y ago
  I agree with this whole-heartedly. Certainly some facts can imply a certain understanding of the world, but they don't require that understanding in order to remain true. The map may require the territory, but the territory does not require the map. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” ― Philip K. Dick
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foxglacier 1y ago
This whole article is based on misinterpreting Microsoft's "AI applicability score" for "risk of job being made redundant by AI". From the original paper: "This score captures if there is nontrivial AI usage that successfully completes activities corresponding to significant portions of an occupation’s tasks." Then the author describes their job qualitatively matching their AI applicability score by using AI to do most of their work for them. If there's a lot of unmet demand for low-priced high-quality translation, translators could end up having more work, not less.
vouaobrasil 1y ago
> One, there is no way LLMs in their current state are capable of replacing human translators for a case like this. And two, they do make the job of translation a lot less tedious. I wouldn't call it pleasant exactly, but it was much easier than my previous translation experiences On the other hand, one day they will replace human beings. And secondly, if something like transalation (or in general, any mental work) becomes too easy, then we also run the risk of incresing the amount of mediocre works. Fact is, if something is hard, we'll only spend time on it if it's really worthwhile. Same thing happens with phone cameras. Yes, it makes some things more convenient, but it also has resulted in a mountain of mediocrity, which isn't free to store (requires energy and hence pollutes the environment).
- pests 1y ago
  Technically modern LLMs are handicapped on translation tasks compared to the original transformer architecture. The origami transformer got to see future context as well as past tokens.
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
    Okay, but I'm not really concerned with the state of the art now with any specific technology, but what will be the state of the art in 20 years.
moritzwarhier 1y ago
One of the few articles about AI on the front page that doesn't make me want to throw my phone against a wall. Haven't even read it completely, but in contrast to the countless submissions regurgitating badly thought-out meta arguments about AI-supported software engineering, it actually seems to elaborate on some interesting points. I also think that the internet as a primary communication and mass medium + generative AI evokes 1984, very strongly.
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krunck 1y ago
AI represents a move to the massive centralization of information into a few sources. History (or it's "interpreters") should never be in the hands of these few powerful entities aligned with even more powerful governments.
- SilverElfin 1y ago
  This. Any centralization or gate keeping of speech and knowledge is a danger to free societies. The tech is moving too fast for politics to keep up. I wonder if the only fix is to elect younger people, even if they’re missing other types of knowledge and experience.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  AI is the perfect propaganda technology. I don't believe the current race to build AI is actually about any productivity gains (which are questionable at best). I believe the true purpose of the outsized AI investments is to make sure the universal answer machine will give answers that conform to the ideology of the ruling class. You can read hints of that in statements like the Trump AI Action Plan [0], but also things like the Llama 4 announcement. [1] [0] "Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech and American Values" - https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americ... [1] "It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet." https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/
  - add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    The fact that it can both displace vast amounts of labor and also control information for people who won't bother with primary sources anymore is what explains (for me) the endless funding and desperation to make it happen.
  - mapontosevenths 1y ago
    "This is due to the types of training data available on the internet." I'd love to see them prove this, but they can't.
NitpickLawyer 1y ago
> There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do. Yeah, no. I find it funny how everyone from other specialties take offence when their piece of "advanced" whatever gets put on a list, but they have absolutely no issue with making uninformed, inaccurate and oversimplified remarks like "averaging machines". Brother, these averaging machines just scored gold at IMO. Allow me to doubt that whatever you do is more impressive than that.
- throwanem 1y ago
  Okay, shapecel.
- Paratoner 1y ago
  Oh, data gods! Oh, technocratic overlords! Milords, shant though giveth but a crumb of cryptocurrency to thy humble guzzler?
  - NitpickLawyer 1y ago
    I mean, I get the sarcasm, but don't get the cryptobabble. And this isn't about data or technoanything in particular. In order to get gold at IMO the system had to a) "solve" NLP enough to understand the problem b) reason through various "themes", ideas, partial demonstrations and so on c) verify some d) gather the good ideas from all the tried paths and come up with the correct demonstrations in the end Now tell me a system like this can't take source material and all the expert writings so far, and come up with various interpretations based on those combinations. And tell me it'll be less accurate than some historian's "vibes". Or a translator's "feelings". I don't buy it.
    - tech_ken 1y ago
      I dunno I can see an argument that something like IMO word problems are categorically a different language space than a corpus of historiography. For one, even when expressed in English language math is still highly, highly structured. Definitions of terms are totally unambiguous, logical tautologies can be expressed using only a few tokens, etc. etc. It's incredibly impressive that these rich structures can be learned by such a flexible model class, but it definitely seems closer (to me) to excelling at chess or other structured game, versus something as ambiguous as synthesis of historical narratives. > Now tell me a system like this can't take source material and all the expert writings so far, and come up with various interpretations based on those combinations. And tell me it'll be less accurate than some historian's "vibes". Framing it as the kind of problem where accuracy is a well-defined concept is the error this article is talking about. Literally the historian's "vibes" and "feelings" are the product you're trying to mimic with the LLM output, not an error to be smoothed out. I have no doubt that LLMs can have real impact in this field, especially as turbopowered search engines and text-management tools. But the point of human narrative history is fundamentally that we tell it to ourselves, and make sense of it by talking about it. Removing the human from the loop is IMO like trying to replace the therapy client with a chat agent.
Obscurity4340 1y ago
> History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do. Well-put
Phui3ferubus 1y ago
> they are acts of interpretation that are never recognized as such by outsiders And that is exactly why translators are getting replaced by ML/AI. Companies don't care about quality, that is the reason customer support was the first thing axed, companies see it only as a cost.
munificent 1y ago
> There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do. This exactly why tech companies want to replace those jobs with LLMs. The companies control the models, the models control the narrative, the narrative controls the world. Whoever can get the most stories into the heads of the masses runs the world.
- randysalami 1y ago
  "tech companies", "companies [who] control the models", "whoever" To be more discrete, patchwork alliances of elites stretching decades and centuries back to concentrate power. Tech companies are under the thumb of the US government and the US government is under the thumb of the elites. It's not direct but it doesn't need to be. Many soft power mechanisms exist and can be deployed when needed e.g. Visa/Mastercard censorship. The US was always founded for elites, by elites but concessions needed to be made to workers out of necessity. With technology and the destruction of unions, this is no longer the case. The veracity of this statement is still up for debate but truth won't stop them from giving it a shot (see WW2). "Whoever can get the most stories into the heads of the masses runs the world." I'd argue this is already the case. It has nothing to do with transformer models or AGI but basic machine learning algorithms being applied at scale in apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook to addict users, fragment them, and destroy their sense of reality. They are running the world and what is happening now is their plan to keep running it, eternally, and in the most extreme fashion.
  - deleted 1y ago
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- throwawayq3423 1y ago
  I think you dramatically overestimate the effectiveness of trying to shape narratives and change people's minds. Yes, online content is incredibly influential, but it's not like you can just choose which content is effective. The effectiveness is tied to a zeitgeist that is not predictable, as far as I have seen.
dale_glass 1y ago
> The deeper risk is not that AI will replace historians or translators, but that it will convince us we never needed them in the first place. I think the bigger danger would be that they'd lose the unimportant grunt work that helped the field exist. Fields need a large amount of consistent routine work to keep existing. Like when analog photography got replaced by digital. A photo lab can't just pay the bills with the few pro photographers that refuse to move to digital or have a specific need for analog. They needed a steady supply of cat pictures and terrible vacation photos, and when those dried up, things got tough. So things like translation may go that way too -- those that need good quality translation understand the need very well, but industry was always supported by a lot of less demanding grunt work that now just went away.
- spwa4 1y ago
  "Convince us"? There's no need for that at all. We've done all that ourselves. Just check the latest budgets for university history departments.
- nicbou 1y ago
  We aee currently wrecking the economics of running an informational website with ChatGPT and AI summaries. Who will bother reviewing products when Google places the conclusion right on top of the search results, before the source itself? Likewise, who will bother chronicling things and putting information online without an audience? What will be the point of blogging and publishing photos or data that future historians will use? There is so much grunt work that is no longer viable even at earlier steps in the chain. We will lose a lot to AI.
  - smsm42 1y ago
    I am actually paying right now to an organization that has humans reviewing things. I will stop paying the moment I learn humans are no longer the determining factor, and will switch my business to the place where they still are. I don't think non-ai- slop reviews don't gavd market, and sincerely hope a lot of people think the same.
fpoling 1y ago
There are nice example how even after human input the translation misses things. For example, the price of the fish was stated as 2.40 rubles. This is meaningless outside the context and does not explain why it was very expensive for the old man who checked the fish first. But if one knows that this was Soviet SF that was about a life in a small Soviet town of that time, then one also knows that a monthly pension was like 70-80 rubles so the fish cost was a daily income. Then one needs to remember that the only payment method was cash and people did not go out with amount more than they would expect to spend to minimize the loss in case of thievery etc. and banking was non-existing in practice so people hold the savings in cash at home. That explains why Lozhkin went to home for the money.
- golergka 1y ago
  This is also something that an LLM would be able to easily explain. I'm pretty confident that all 4o-level models know these facts without web search.
  - dimitri-vs 1y ago
    Not in my experience. Unless you explicitly prompt and bias that model for that kind of deep answer (which you won't unless you are already experienced in the field) you're going to get some sycophantic superficial dribble that's only slightly better than the wikipedia page.
- 7734128 1y ago
  Would you want a translator to somehow jam that context into the story? Otherwise, I fail to see how it's an issue of translation. If I had learned Russian and read the story in the original language, I would be in the same position regardless.
  - dale_glass 1y ago
    Some translators may add notes on the bottom of the page for things like that. It's going to greatly vary of course. Some will try to culturally adapt things. Maybe convert to dollars, maybe translate to "a day's wages", maybe translate as it is then add an explanatory note. You might even get a preface explaining important cultural elements of the era.
ysofunny 1y ago
the more we can all dump EVERYTHING we got into the same giant mega AI, the better off we will all be. but of course, this goes directly against how so many people think, that I won't even bo
derbOac 1y ago
> But as Goethe said, every fact is already a theory. That’s why facts cannot save you. “Data” will not save you. There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. There may be no objective story, but some stories and fact theories are more rigorous and thoroughly defended than others.
stereolambda 1y ago
Many historians work on manuscripts and/or large archives of documents that might not be digitized, let alone be accessible in the internet. The proportion of human knowledge that is available in the internet, especially if we further constrain to English-language and non-Darkweb or pirated, is greatly exaggerated. So there are infrastructure problems that LLMs by themselves don't solve. On the other hand, people tend to be happy with a history that ignores 90+% of what happened, instead focusing on a "central" narrative, which traditionally focussed on maybe 5 Euro-Atlantic great powers, and nowadays somewhat pretends not to. That being said, I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth advanced by the article. Maybe it's hard to positively establish facts, but it doesn't mean one cannot negatively establish falsehoods and this matters more in practice, in the end. This feels salient when touching on opinions of Carr's as a Soviet-friendly historian.
- fn-mote 1y ago
  > I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth [...] The work of historians is to make inferences based on incomplete and contradictory sources. Historians aren't simple fact-checkers. They make judgements in an attempt to understand the sweep of history. You can see what kind of work they have to do every time you stare at some bullshit narrative put out by a company about how really it was good for the local economy for them to run their fracking operation, and the waste water really was filtered three times so it couldn't be causing the overabundance of three-legged frogs, and last year they funded two scientific studies that prove it. (I just made this up, hope you get the idea.)
- MattPalmer1086 1y ago
  My Dad, who is a professor of history, always used to say that being a historian is like being a detective, piecing together many different sources of incomplete or false information from unreliable sources, assessing motivations for actions, and so on. You may indeed be able to establish some facts with high confidence. Many others will be suppositions or just possibilities. Establishing "facts" though is not really the point (despite how history is taught in school). You try to weave all these different things into a bigger narrative or picture. It is most definitely an act of interpretation, which itself is embedded in our current conceptions (some of which are invisible to us and which future historians may then riff on). Saying that you don't like the subjectivist take on history means you think there is an objective history out there to be had which we could all agree on, but that does not exist.
dguest 1y ago
here's the paper this guy seems to be reacting to https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935v1
- dguest 1y ago
  Short summary: the actual paper doesn't say anything about historians or translators being replaced by AI. It says AI could be impactful to those fields. Modern chemistry is impactful to medicine but it didn't replace doctors. So unfortunately the article this post linked to, while it has its own merits, starts off by citing a clickbait tweet and wildly misinterpreting the paper in the first sentence. Still, I hope people give both article and paper a generous reading. Even if the article starts off terribly it has interesting points which we shouldn't disregard just because of a lazy hook. The intermediate tweet, by contrast, is just lazy clickbait: half-truths and screencaps, the bread and butter of modern disinformation. The sad thing is that it's easier than it's ever been to follow up on references. Even in this case, where the tweet itself provides no citations at all, I had to search for less than a minute to find the original paper.
tombert 1y ago
I'm sorry, as someone who genuinely likes AI, I still have to say that I have to call bullshit on Microsoft's study on this. I use ChatGPT all the time, but it's not going to "replace web developers" because that's almost a statement that doesn't even make sense. You see all these examples like "I got ChatGPT to make a JS space invaders game!" and that's cool and all, but that's sort of missing a pretty crucial part: the beginning of a new project is almost always the easiest and most fun part of the project. Showing me a robot that can make a project that pretty much any intern could do isn't so impressive to me. Show me a bot that can maintain a project over the course of months and update it based on the whims of a bunch of incompetent MBAs who scope creep a million new features and who don't actually know what they want, and I might start worrying. I don't know anything about the other careers so I can't speak to that, but I'd be pretty surprised if "Mathematician" is at severe risk as well. Honestly, is there any reason for Microsoft to even be honest with this shit? Of course they want to make it look like their AI is so advanced because that makes them look better and their stock price might go up. If they're wrong, it's not like it matters, corporations in America are never honest.
- dguest 1y ago
  I agree with you, but one correction: the bullshit is on the twitter post that this article links to (in the first sentence) and by extension on the article. The paper itself [1] doesn't say "replace" anywhere: the purpose was to measure where AI has an "impact". They even say (in the discussion) It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated and thus experience job or wage loss... This would be a mistake ... Take the example of ATMs, which ... led to an increase in the number of bank teller jobs as banks opened more branches at lower costs and tellers focused on more valuable relationship-building... Ok, good. Something definitely seems amiss when a bunch of CS researchers are reporting that "mathematicians" are one of the most "replaceable" (good luck designing a new LLM without any knowledge of math). Overall this post says something about the sad state of twitter and search: I had to dig though quite a few articles which repeated this job replacement crap before I could even find the title of the article (which was then easy to find on arXiv). And go figure, the authors didn't mean to make the statement everyone says they made. [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935v1 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935v1
ping00 1y ago
This is a very tangential comment, but I read the short story (https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8eh2woz05ndfxinbf9vdh/Goldfish-for-Sale.pdf?rlkey=d9uwewed241l55tt6cad1a1q4&e=1&st=xv7517uk&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8eh2woz05ndfxinbf9vdh/Goldfis...) and loved it (took me around 15 minutes to read). Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on the original author, Kir Bulychev, and saw that he wrote many short stories set in Veliky Guslar (which explained the name Greater Bard). The overall tone is very very similar to R.K. Narayan's Malgudi Days (albeit without the fantastical elements of talking goldfish), which is a favorite of mine. If anyone wants to get into reading some easily approachable Indian English literature, I always point them to Narayan and Adiga (who wrote The White Tiger). On that note, does anyone else have any recommendations on authors who make use of this device (small/mid-sized city which serves as a backdrop for an anthology of short stories from a variety of characters' perspectives)?
ljalkjflkajl 1y ago
> The deeper risk is not that AI will replace historians or translators, but that it will convince us we never needed them in the first place. This is exactly what tech monopolies want. To make everyone forget about the alternatives to their products. Strip Newspeak down to the very bone. Eliminate the words for things they can't control.

171 points by veqq 1y ago

> The initial draft was terrible in conveying tone, irony, or any kind of cultural allusion. My mother reads books mostly in Russian, including books by English-speaking authors translated into Russian. Some of the translations are laughably bad; one recent example had to translate "hot MILF", and just translated "hot" verbatim - as in the adjective indicating temperature - and just transliterated the word "MILF", as the translator (or machine?) apparently just had no idea what it was, and didn't know the equivalent term in Russian. As a mirror, I have a hard time reading things in Russian - I left when I was ten years old, so I'm very out of practice, and most of the cultural allusions go straight over my head as well. A good translation needs to make those things clear, either via a good translation, or by footnotes that explain things to the reader. And this doesn't just apply to linguistic translation - the past is a foreign country, too. Reading old texts - any old texts - requires context.

notpushkin 1y ago
As a Russian, горячая милфа is exactly how I’d translate it. I think a lot of slang got borrowed like this in 2000-s.
- smsm42 1y ago
  A substantial portion of modern Russian slang is borrowed from hilariously badly translated western movies or games or songs, and then the terms just stayed around, because there wasn't any better alternative.
incone123 1y ago
Reminds me of my Czech friend explaining some of the subtle humour in 'Kolya' which I would never have got just from the English subtitles.
Joker_vD 1y ago
> and just translated "hot" verbatim - as in the adjective indicating temperature Well, "горячий" does have figurative meaning "passionate" (and by transfer, "sexy") in Russian just as it has in English. Heck, English is even worse in this regard: "heated argument", seriously? Not only an argument doesn't have a temperature, you can't change it either (since it does not exist)! Yet the phrase exists just fine, and it translates as "hot argument" to Russian, no problem. No comments on "MILF" though. But I wouldn't be surprised if it actually entered the (youth/Internet) slang as-is: many other English words did as well.
qingcharles 1y ago
A lot of commercial translations of foreign books are out of date. The ones sold in stores use translations that are > 100 years old because then they are public domain and they don't have to pay any royalties to anyone. I can highly recommend anyone who is looking to read a foreign book research the translation before they buy it. Some awesome modern translations don't bubble up in the searches because their sales are much lower than the cheaper versions.

masfuerte 1y ago

> Still, without AI a story like this would have taken me several weeks to translate and polish, instead of one afternoon. I don't understand this. It's only six thousand words and it's the polishing that takes the time. How would it have taken weeks to do the initial draft?

AlecSchueler 1y ago
I suppose different people work differently and the author knows themselves better than we do?
WastedCucumber 1y ago
Maybe he's... not great at Russian? I'm at a loss, same as you. And I don't have any skill in Russian, but I would say that his translation is not good, or at least was not thoughtfully made, based solely on the fact that he did not write the author's name in it.
- shaky 1y ago
  I don't understand: the translation is not good because he omitted the author's name? He stated it plainly in his article: > As it happens, I recently translated a short story by Kir Bulychev — a Soviet science-fiction icon virtually unknown in the West. I for one enjoyed reading it! As for the article, it's on point. There will be fewer historians and translators, but I suspect those that stick around will be greatly amplified.
  - chupasaurus 1y ago
    > I for one enjoyed reading it! I gave a quick look and was surprised to see that the most of the first two paragraphs simply aren't there. I guess you've read something else! As for machine translation: currently it isn't remotely ready to deal with literature by itself, but it could be handy to assist translators.
  - WastedCucumber 1y ago
    In the PDF linked in the article there's only the title of the story, and not the author's name.

glenstein 1y ago

I agree and disagree. It's certainly the case that facts imply underlying epistemologies, but it completely misses the point to treat that like it entails catastrophic relativism. Building up an epistemology isn't just recreational, ideally it's done for good reasons that are responsive to scrunity, standing firm on important principles and, where necessarily, conciliatory in response to epistemological conundrums. In short, such theories can be resilient and responsible, and facts based on them can inherent that resilience. So I think it completely misses the point to think that "facts imply epistemologies" should have the upshot of destroying any conception of access to authoritative factual understanding. Global warming is still real, vaccines are still effective, sunscreen works, dinosaurs really existed. And perhaps, more to the point in this context, there really are better and worse understandings of the fall of Rome or the Dark Ages or Pompeii or the Iraq war. If being accountable to the theory-laden epistemic status of facts means throwing the stability of our historical understanding into question, you're doing it wrong. And, as it relates to the article, you're doing it super wrong if you think that creates an opening for a notion of human intuition that is fundamentally non-informational. I think it's definitely true that AI as it currently exists can spew out linguistically flat translations, lacking such things as an interpretive touch, or an implicit literary and cultural curiosity that breathes the fire of life and meaning into language as it is actually experienced by humans. That's a great and necessary criticism. But. Hubert Dreyfus spent decades insisting that there were things "computers can't do", and that those things were represented by magical undefined terms that speak to ineffable human essence. He insisted, for instance, that computers performing chess at a high level would never happen because it required "insight", and he felt similarly about the kind of linguistic comprehension that has now, at least in part, been achieved by LLMs. LLMs still fall short in critical ways, and losing sight of that would involve letting go of our ability to appreciate the best human work in (say) history, or linguistics. And there's a real risk that "good enough" AI can cause us to lose touch with such distinctions. But I don't think it follows that you have to draw a categorical line insisting such understanding is impossible, and in fact I would suggest that's a tragic misunderstanding that gets everything exactly backwards.

mapontosevenths 1y ago
I agree with this whole-heartedly. Certainly some facts can imply a certain understanding of the world, but they don't require that understanding in order to remain true. The map may require the territory, but the territory does not require the map. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” ― Philip K. Dick

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foxglacier 1y ago

This whole article is based on misinterpreting Microsoft's "AI applicability score" for "risk of job being made redundant by AI". From the original paper: "This score captures if there is nontrivial AI usage that successfully completes activities corresponding to significant portions of an occupation’s tasks." Then the author describes their job qualitatively matching their AI applicability score by using AI to do most of their work for them. If there's a lot of unmet demand for low-priced high-quality translation, translators could end up having more work, not less.

vouaobrasil 1y ago

> One, there is no way LLMs in their current state are capable of replacing human translators for a case like this. And two, they do make the job of translation a lot less tedious. I wouldn't call it pleasant exactly, but it was much easier than my previous translation experiences On the other hand, one day they will replace human beings. And secondly, if something like transalation (or in general, any mental work) becomes too easy, then we also run the risk of incresing the amount of mediocre works. Fact is, if something is hard, we'll only spend time on it if it's really worthwhile. Same thing happens with phone cameras. Yes, it makes some things more convenient, but it also has resulted in a mountain of mediocrity, which isn't free to store (requires energy and hence pollutes the environment).

pests 1y ago
Technically modern LLMs are handicapped on translation tasks compared to the original transformer architecture. The origami transformer got to see future context as well as past tokens.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  Okay, but I'm not really concerned with the state of the art now with any specific technology, but what will be the state of the art in 20 years.

moritzwarhier 1y ago

One of the few articles about AI on the front page that doesn't make me want to throw my phone against a wall. Haven't even read it completely, but in contrast to the countless submissions regurgitating badly thought-out meta arguments about AI-supported software engineering, it actually seems to elaborate on some interesting points. I also think that the internet as a primary communication and mass medium + generative AI evokes 1984, very strongly.

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krunck 1y ago

AI represents a move to the massive centralization of information into a few sources. History (or it's "interpreters") should never be in the hands of these few powerful entities aligned with even more powerful governments.

SilverElfin 1y ago
This. Any centralization or gate keeping of speech and knowledge is a danger to free societies. The tech is moving too fast for politics to keep up. I wonder if the only fix is to elect younger people, even if they’re missing other types of knowledge and experience.
saubeidl 1y ago
AI is the perfect propaganda technology. I don't believe the current race to build AI is actually about any productivity gains (which are questionable at best). I believe the true purpose of the outsized AI investments is to make sure the universal answer machine will give answers that conform to the ideology of the ruling class. You can read hints of that in statements like the Trump AI Action Plan [0], but also things like the Llama 4 announcement. [1] [0] "Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech and American Values" - https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americ... [1] "It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet." https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  The fact that it can both displace vast amounts of labor and also control information for people who won't bother with primary sources anymore is what explains (for me) the endless funding and desperation to make it happen.
- mapontosevenths 1y ago
  "This is due to the types of training data available on the internet." I'd love to see them prove this, but they can't.

NitpickLawyer 1y ago

> There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do. Yeah, no. I find it funny how everyone from other specialties take offence when their piece of "advanced" whatever gets put on a list, but they have absolutely no issue with making uninformed, inaccurate and oversimplified remarks like "averaging machines". Brother, these averaging machines just scored gold at IMO. Allow me to doubt that whatever you do is more impressive than that.

throwanem 1y ago
Okay, shapecel.
Paratoner 1y ago
Oh, data gods! Oh, technocratic overlords! Milords, shant though giveth but a crumb of cryptocurrency to thy humble guzzler?
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago
  I mean, I get the sarcasm, but don't get the cryptobabble. And this isn't about data or technoanything in particular. In order to get gold at IMO the system had to a) "solve" NLP enough to understand the problem b) reason through various "themes", ideas, partial demonstrations and so on c) verify some d) gather the good ideas from all the tried paths and come up with the correct demonstrations in the end Now tell me a system like this can't take source material and all the expert writings so far, and come up with various interpretations based on those combinations. And tell me it'll be less accurate than some historian's "vibes". Or a translator's "feelings". I don't buy it.
  - tech_ken 1y ago
    I dunno I can see an argument that something like IMO word problems are categorically a different language space than a corpus of historiography. For one, even when expressed in English language math is still highly, highly structured. Definitions of terms are totally unambiguous, logical tautologies can be expressed using only a few tokens, etc. etc. It's incredibly impressive that these rich structures can be learned by such a flexible model class, but it definitely seems closer (to me) to excelling at chess or other structured game, versus something as ambiguous as synthesis of historical narratives. > Now tell me a system like this can't take source material and all the expert writings so far, and come up with various interpretations based on those combinations. And tell me it'll be less accurate than some historian's "vibes". Framing it as the kind of problem where accuracy is a well-defined concept is the error this article is talking about. Literally the historian's "vibes" and "feelings" are the product you're trying to mimic with the LLM output, not an error to be smoothed out. I have no doubt that LLMs can have real impact in this field, especially as turbopowered search engines and text-management tools. But the point of human narrative history is fundamentally that we tell it to ourselves, and make sense of it by talking about it. Removing the human from the loop is IMO like trying to replace the therapy client with a chat agent.

Obscurity4340 1y ago

> History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do. Well-put

Phui3ferubus 1y ago

> they are acts of interpretation that are never recognized as such by outsiders And that is exactly why translators are getting replaced by ML/AI. Companies don't care about quality, that is the reason customer support was the first thing axed, companies see it only as a cost.

munificent 1y ago

> There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do. This exactly why tech companies want to replace those jobs with LLMs. The companies control the models, the models control the narrative, the narrative controls the world. Whoever can get the most stories into the heads of the masses runs the world.

randysalami 1y ago
"tech companies", "companies [who] control the models", "whoever" To be more discrete, patchwork alliances of elites stretching decades and centuries back to concentrate power. Tech companies are under the thumb of the US government and the US government is under the thumb of the elites. It's not direct but it doesn't need to be. Many soft power mechanisms exist and can be deployed when needed e.g. Visa/Mastercard censorship. The US was always founded for elites, by elites but concessions needed to be made to workers out of necessity. With technology and the destruction of unions, this is no longer the case. The veracity of this statement is still up for debate but truth won't stop them from giving it a shot (see WW2). "Whoever can get the most stories into the heads of the masses runs the world." I'd argue this is already the case. It has nothing to do with transformer models or AGI but basic machine learning algorithms being applied at scale in apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook to addict users, fragment them, and destroy their sense of reality. They are running the world and what is happening now is their plan to keep running it, eternally, and in the most extreme fashion.
- deleted 1y ago
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throwawayq3423 1y ago
I think you dramatically overestimate the effectiveness of trying to shape narratives and change people's minds. Yes, online content is incredibly influential, but it's not like you can just choose which content is effective. The effectiveness is tied to a zeitgeist that is not predictable, as far as I have seen.

dale_glass 1y ago

> The deeper risk is not that AI will replace historians or translators, but that it will convince us we never needed them in the first place. I think the bigger danger would be that they'd lose the unimportant grunt work that helped the field exist. Fields need a large amount of consistent routine work to keep existing. Like when analog photography got replaced by digital. A photo lab can't just pay the bills with the few pro photographers that refuse to move to digital or have a specific need for analog. They needed a steady supply of cat pictures and terrible vacation photos, and when those dried up, things got tough. So things like translation may go that way too -- those that need good quality translation understand the need very well, but industry was always supported by a lot of less demanding grunt work that now just went away.

spwa4 1y ago
"Convince us"? There's no need for that at all. We've done all that ourselves. Just check the latest budgets for university history departments.
nicbou 1y ago
We aee currently wrecking the economics of running an informational website with ChatGPT and AI summaries. Who will bother reviewing products when Google places the conclusion right on top of the search results, before the source itself? Likewise, who will bother chronicling things and putting information online without an audience? What will be the point of blogging and publishing photos or data that future historians will use? There is so much grunt work that is no longer viable even at earlier steps in the chain. We will lose a lot to AI.
- smsm42 1y ago
  I am actually paying right now to an organization that has humans reviewing things. I will stop paying the moment I learn humans are no longer the determining factor, and will switch my business to the place where they still are. I don't think non-ai- slop reviews don't gavd market, and sincerely hope a lot of people think the same.

fpoling 1y ago

There are nice example how even after human input the translation misses things. For example, the price of the fish was stated as 2.40 rubles. This is meaningless outside the context and does not explain why it was very expensive for the old man who checked the fish first. But if one knows that this was Soviet SF that was about a life in a small Soviet town of that time, then one also knows that a monthly pension was like 70-80 rubles so the fish cost was a daily income. Then one needs to remember that the only payment method was cash and people did not go out with amount more than they would expect to spend to minimize the loss in case of thievery etc. and banking was non-existing in practice so people hold the savings in cash at home. That explains why Lozhkin went to home for the money.

golergka 1y ago
This is also something that an LLM would be able to easily explain. I'm pretty confident that all 4o-level models know these facts without web search.
- dimitri-vs 1y ago
  Not in my experience. Unless you explicitly prompt and bias that model for that kind of deep answer (which you won't unless you are already experienced in the field) you're going to get some sycophantic superficial dribble that's only slightly better than the wikipedia page.
7734128 1y ago
Would you want a translator to somehow jam that context into the story? Otherwise, I fail to see how it's an issue of translation. If I had learned Russian and read the story in the original language, I would be in the same position regardless.
- dale_glass 1y ago
  Some translators may add notes on the bottom of the page for things like that. It's going to greatly vary of course. Some will try to culturally adapt things. Maybe convert to dollars, maybe translate to "a day's wages", maybe translate as it is then add an explanatory note. You might even get a preface explaining important cultural elements of the era.

ysofunny 1y ago

the more we can all dump EVERYTHING we got into the same giant mega AI, the better off we will all be. but of course, this goes directly against how so many people think, that I won't even bo

derbOac 1y ago

> But as Goethe said, every fact is already a theory. That’s why facts cannot save you. “Data” will not save you. There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. There may be no objective story, but some stories and fact theories are more rigorous and thoroughly defended than others.

stereolambda 1y ago

Many historians work on manuscripts and/or large archives of documents that might not be digitized, let alone be accessible in the internet. The proportion of human knowledge that is available in the internet, especially if we further constrain to English-language and non-Darkweb or pirated, is greatly exaggerated. So there are infrastructure problems that LLMs by themselves don't solve. On the other hand, people tend to be happy with a history that ignores 90+% of what happened, instead focusing on a "central" narrative, which traditionally focussed on maybe 5 Euro-Atlantic great powers, and nowadays somewhat pretends not to. That being said, I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth advanced by the article. Maybe it's hard to positively establish facts, but it doesn't mean one cannot negatively establish falsehoods and this matters more in practice, in the end. This feels salient when touching on opinions of Carr's as a Soviet-friendly historian.

fn-mote 1y ago
> I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth [...] The work of historians is to make inferences based on incomplete and contradictory sources. Historians aren't simple fact-checkers. They make judgements in an attempt to understand the sweep of history. You can see what kind of work they have to do every time you stare at some bullshit narrative put out by a company about how really it was good for the local economy for them to run their fracking operation, and the waste water really was filtered three times so it couldn't be causing the overabundance of three-legged frogs, and last year they funded two scientific studies that prove it. (I just made this up, hope you get the idea.)
MattPalmer1086 1y ago
My Dad, who is a professor of history, always used to say that being a historian is like being a detective, piecing together many different sources of incomplete or false information from unreliable sources, assessing motivations for actions, and so on. You may indeed be able to establish some facts with high confidence. Many others will be suppositions or just possibilities. Establishing "facts" though is not really the point (despite how history is taught in school). You try to weave all these different things into a bigger narrative or picture. It is most definitely an act of interpretation, which itself is embedded in our current conceptions (some of which are invisible to us and which future historians may then riff on). Saying that you don't like the subjectivist take on history means you think there is an objective history out there to be had which we could all agree on, but that does not exist.

dguest 1y ago

here's the paper this guy seems to be reacting to https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935v1

dguest 1y ago
Short summary: the actual paper doesn't say anything about historians or translators being replaced by AI. It says AI could be impactful to those fields. Modern chemistry is impactful to medicine but it didn't replace doctors. So unfortunately the article this post linked to, while it has its own merits, starts off by citing a clickbait tweet and wildly misinterpreting the paper in the first sentence. Still, I hope people give both article and paper a generous reading. Even if the article starts off terribly it has interesting points which we shouldn't disregard just because of a lazy hook. The intermediate tweet, by contrast, is just lazy clickbait: half-truths and screencaps, the bread and butter of modern disinformation. The sad thing is that it's easier than it's ever been to follow up on references. Even in this case, where the tweet itself provides no citations at all, I had to search for less than a minute to find the original paper.

tombert 1y ago

I'm sorry, as someone who genuinely likes AI, I still have to say that I have to call bullshit on Microsoft's study on this. I use ChatGPT all the time, but it's not going to "replace web developers" because that's almost a statement that doesn't even make sense. You see all these examples like "I got ChatGPT to make a JS space invaders game!" and that's cool and all, but that's sort of missing a pretty crucial part: the beginning of a new project is almost always the easiest and most fun part of the project. Showing me a robot that can make a project that pretty much any intern could do isn't so impressive to me. Show me a bot that can maintain a project over the course of months and update it based on the whims of a bunch of incompetent MBAs who scope creep a million new features and who don't actually know what they want, and I might start worrying. I don't know anything about the other careers so I can't speak to that, but I'd be pretty surprised if "Mathematician" is at severe risk as well. Honestly, is there any reason for Microsoft to even be honest with this shit? Of course they want to make it look like their AI is so advanced because that makes them look better and their stock price might go up. If they're wrong, it's not like it matters, corporations in America are never honest.

dguest 1y ago
I agree with you, but one correction: the bullshit is on the twitter post that this article links to (in the first sentence) and by extension on the article. The paper itself [1] doesn't say "replace" anywhere: the purpose was to measure where AI has an "impact". They even say (in the discussion) It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated and thus experience job or wage loss... This would be a mistake ... Take the example of ATMs, which ... led to an increase in the number of bank teller jobs as banks opened more branches at lower costs and tellers focused on more valuable relationship-building... Ok, good. Something definitely seems amiss when a bunch of CS researchers are reporting that "mathematicians" are one of the most "replaceable" (good luck designing a new LLM without any knowledge of math). Overall this post says something about the sad state of twitter and search: I had to dig though quite a few articles which repeated this job replacement crap before I could even find the title of the article (which was then easy to find on arXiv). And go figure, the authors didn't mean to make the statement everyone says they made. [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935v1 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935v1

ping00 1y ago

This is a very tangential comment, but I read the short story (https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8eh2woz05ndfxinbf9vdh/Goldfish-for-Sale.pdf?rlkey=d9uwewed241l55tt6cad1a1q4&e=1&st=xv7517uk&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8eh2woz05ndfxinbf9vdh/Goldfis...) and loved it (took me around 15 minutes to read). Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on the original author, Kir Bulychev, and saw that he wrote many short stories set in Veliky Guslar (which explained the name Greater Bard). The overall tone is very very similar to R.K. Narayan's Malgudi Days (albeit without the fantastical elements of talking goldfish), which is a favorite of mine. If anyone wants to get into reading some easily approachable Indian English literature, I always point them to Narayan and Adiga (who wrote The White Tiger). On that note, does anyone else have any recommendations on authors who make use of this device (small/mid-sized city which serves as a backdrop for an anthology of short stories from a variety of characters' perspectives)?

ljalkjflkajl 1y ago

> The deeper risk is not that AI will replace historians or translators, but that it will convince us we never needed them in the first place. This is exactly what tech monopolies want. To make everyone forget about the alternatives to their products. Strip Newspeak down to the very bone. Eliminate the words for things they can't control.