7 ms·

AI, Wikipedia, and uncorrected machine translations of vulnerable languages

131 points by kawera 1y ago

foxglacier 1y ago
If nobody's reading them and nobody's writing them, then perhaps it doesn't matter. We could let Wikipedia-Greenlandic persist as its own evolved language that forks from the original. > potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them. OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use whatever languages are appropriate to them and we don't need to maintain them forever.
- aucisson_masque 1y ago
  I see that this comment get downvoted but I think we can agree on the facts that languages, just like species, die while other flourish. And that's fine. Survival of the fittest, right ? Not enough people speaking Greenlandic, too complicated even for it's own population who would rather speak danish ? The very reason I'm speaking English is because it was forced military during the 19th century by the UK and since the 20th by Hollywood. Just like a virus, if a language doesn't spread, it die.
  - jiggawatts 11mo ago
    As an immigrant to an anglophone country, I noticed a few things: When people have varying levels of capability with languages, they’ll switch to whatever is the lowest common denominator — the language that the group can best communicate in. This tended to be English, even amongst a bunch of native speakers of a common foreign language. Moreover, this is context dependent: when talking about technical matters (especially computing), the Lingua Franca (pun intended) is English. You’ll hear “locals” switch to either mixed or pure English, even if they’re not great at it. Science, aviation, etc… is the same. Before English it was French that had this role, and before then it was Latin and Greek. The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere. International commerce becomes practical. Students can study overseas, spreading ideas further and wider. Books have a bigger market, attracting smarter and better authors. There’s a bigger pool of talented authors to begin with, some of which write educational textbooks of exceptional sparkling quality. These all compound to create a more educated, vibrant, and varied culture… because of, not despite the single language.
    - overfeed 11mo ago
      > The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere. I find this cultural Darwinism argument incredibly ironic, given how vocal factions in 2 of largest (native) English-speaking countries have been whinging about "their culture" being sullied by immigrants.
      - foxglacier 11mo ago
        It's not ironic that separate people (jiggawatts and US/UK nationalists) hold separate beliefs. But here's a thought. Are you ironic for being one person holding contradictory beliefs? I doubt you have the same contempt for all people who want to maintain their own culture. For example, I'm sure you don't think that New Zealand Maori who want to popularize the Maori language in New Zealand are whinging about it and you wouldn't describe Maori culture in quotes as "their culture", implying it's not really theirs or not really a culture.
        overfeed 11mo ago
        > It's not ironic that separate people (jiggawatts and US/UK nationalists) hold separate beliefs You are correct, but I never claimed that as the source of irony. To set the stage, we have English-speaking nationalists (your term) who obliviously benefit from the rest of the world getting on board the English train at the detriment of their own languages[1] (never mind the circumstances). If we were to accept the language-Darwinism perspective at face value, watching the winning side being salty about (the effects of) winning is incredibly ironic to me. > I doubt you have the same contempt for all people who want to maintain their own culture. Merely observing an ironic situation doesn't mean I have contempt for any group of people. You feel very strongly about the subject and are reading into way more than what I actually wrote. 1. The French language board tries to fight a good fight against Angloisms, but it's a losing battle. Other languages have no structures holding them up, and lose dozens to hundred of words per year. English media is pervasive and incessant.
  - don-bright 11mo ago
    We already see the 'best' LLMs switch between different languages while they are 'thinking'. It seems to me that the more languages it can 'think' in, the better off it will be. Different human languages have different concepts of time, numbers, nature, place, intention, relationships, and so forth and so on.
    - thaumasiotes 11mo ago
      > Survival of the fittest on a long time horizon means the more diversity the better the survival rate will be. This is just a misapplication of the analogy. For a language, "fitness" refers to similarity to whatever language is spoken by people relevant to you. Diversity is the worst quality a language can exhibit, and is the quality that causes dying languages to die. There is no such concept as an external force coming in that certain languages handle better, allowing them to temporarily outcompete other languages. Existing pools of diversity are not protective against this, because it can't happen. Also unlike genetic diversity, linguistic diversity does not need to be maintained as a legacy of the past. It is constantly being generated in much larger quantities than are desired. If you managed to perform the opposite of the Tower of Babel miracle and replaced every currently-spoken language everywhere in the world with a perfect monoculture, within 1-2 generations you'd be back to having mutually unintelligible varieties in different regions.
- arthurjj 11mo ago
  This was my take from the article also. These languages are clearly dying and not many people speak them as their primary language so the human suffering is minimal. Which means keeping them around is a past time that some people happen to enjoy (unless there is a Saphir-Whorf hypothesis I'm missing) But the sentence `well-meaning Wikipedians who think that by creating articles in minority languages they are in some way “helping” those communities` clearly shows the author hasn't really considered the issue.
- phantomathkg 11mo ago
  I thought the argument point is letting it die is OK, but letting wrongfully translated text, becoming the source of AI to chuck out wrongfully translated text is not OK.
  - foxglacier 11mo ago
    Yea, it's kind of pure and good to delete it all. But I'm imagining some self-sustaining evolution of the language through an LLM-Wikipedia feedback loop.
ratg13 1y ago
It's ironic that the "solution" to the problem is being driven by yet another person that isn't native to Greenland. While they may be a Greenlandic teacher, it's almost assured that they are teaching western Greenlandic, which is similar to Canadian Inuktitut. People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds that it's often considered a separate language and not a dialect. When people from East and West Greenland come together, they typically speak Danish because they can't understand each other in their own native language. So we're talking about a country that has 55k people and a portion of them don't even speak the official language.. This guy would have no way of knowing whether something was written poorly by a computer or a poorly educated greenlandic native that maybe isn't so good with the official language. Given that the majority of the country's citizens do not use the internet at all, it is not even clear what his solution is other than just deciding to be some sort of magic arbiter .. which is not realistic or sustainable.
- optionalsquid 1y ago
  > Given that the majority of the country's citizens do not use the internet at all On what do you base this assertion? I was not able to find up-to-date statistics, but 72% of participants in this survey from 2013 had internet access at home, either via PC or via mobile devices, and another 11% had internet access elsewhere: https://digitalimik.gl/-/media/datagl/old_filer/strategi_2018_2021/2013-borgerne--it.pdf https://digitalimik.gl/-/media/datagl/old_filer/strategi_201...
- Uehreka 1y ago
  I wish people on HN would stop acting like “magic arbiter” solutions are “not realistic”, when in reality it’s the only way things have every worked. Are federal judges “magic arbiters”? Yes. Do judges make bad calls? Yes. Do we not like when large numbers of judges who are unfriendly to our side get life appointments? Yes. Has anyone proposed an actual better way of solving these kinds of problems? No. So to get back to the point: Yes the solution is to appoint someone a magic arbiter, and hope they don’t screw up. The fact that it’s a deeply imperfect way of solving problems doesn’t mean it’s not workable. It just means it will backfire at some point, and someone else will get appointed instead.
simonw 1y ago
I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... > an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing Wikipedia at 12 and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing.
- fooker 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - AlienRobot 1y ago
    Yes, half of my entire political ideology is based on posts written by 12 year olds on the Internet. The other half is based on posts written by dogs[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
    - fooker 11mo ago
      Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.
      - aspenmayer 11mo ago
        > Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots. Please consider users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, as your nonstandard usage of nonstandard characters makes parsing your comment difficult if not impossible. Not a slight or a correction, as I am a fan of Zalgo text myself, but after being informed by others about how inscrutable it can be to the differently abled, I have reconsidered using it.
        fooker 11mo ago
aucisson_masque 1y ago
> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with translated articles that contains error isn't much. They should instead close that version of Wikipedia until there are enough volunteers.
- consp 1y ago
  That last part creates a chicken and egg problem. You can argue about it but I will bet it will never get traction if there is no basis to start from.
  - bawolff 11mo ago
    Wikipedia has an "incubator" setup where people can start working on a language in the incubator until it demonstrates enough interest.
- Symbiote 1y ago
  The end of the article says they have closed it.
- Mars008 11mo ago
  > who use AI translator or worst like Google translate It's the same. Google translate uses trained AI models.
- tomlockwood 11mo ago
  > they don't deserve to have one By what unholy pact have you been beknighted as the bestower of wikis, my friend?
  - mslt 11mo ago
    Not the commenter but in this instance it seems like if you want something you need to either be able make/maintain it or fund someone who will, no?
johnea 1y ago
[flagged]
strogonoff 11mo ago
Wikipedia editors is among the many communities that have for a long time mostly successfully relied on the tendency of relatively superficial, easy to validate capabilities (such as being able to use a website, write something resembling real language, and handle basic communication) to correlate with more valuable but harder to validate qualities (such as ability to write reasonably well and follow rules/guidelines, and generally being a well-intentioned person) as one of their main barriers to entry. Attributable to the deluge of commercial LLMs[0] available at such low prices that their operators lose millions to billions of dollars in order to gain market share and ultimately profit, such communities may not be able to continue to exist as is for long, I suspect: either they would be forced to institute more intrusive barriers (be that ID verification, invite-only memberships, or something else) while the deluge lasts, or they may be effectively destroyed when members secretly lacking the requisite qualities and act in bad faith become a majority, damage community’s reputation, and drive out the existing members. [0] Which paradoxically to a significant degree exist thanks to the unpaid work of volunteers in many of such communities.
- muldvarp 11mo ago
  LLMs destroying Wikipedia would be incredibly sad and is one of the things that makes me think that LLMs will have a strong negative impact on the lives of most people.
  - georgefrowny 11mo ago
    I have previously translated a very small handful of redlink articles into English from another language. Chasing down the sources in the other language and synthesising and cross-referencing with English sources is a fun challenge. To the best of my knowledge, I did an OK job. While translation tools are a godsend for that, as well as life in general when dealing with a language I am not that good at, LLMs make me increasingly reluctant to do that much more because there is no way I could detect AI slop in a second language. For all I know I'd be translating junk into English and enabling translingual citogenesis. Bad as the slopwave is for native speakers, it's absolutely brutal for non-native speakers when you can't pick up on the tells. Maybe the gap will narrow and narrow until the slop is stylistically imperceptible.
haiji2025 11mo ago
[flagged]
orbital-decay 11mo ago
That happens by default in low-resource languages, no bad translations needed. They don't have enough either written material to train an LLM, or labels for time periods and various dialects in a continuum. For example even the best multilanguage models will lump up all Berber languages into one unstable abomination nobody speaks, usually writing it in Neo-Tifinagh. Not much can be done about that, training a model in all varieties of these would require a huge specialized effort.
- 1f60c 11mo ago
  And it's a lot more profitable to improve sex mode than to hire a small army of native speakers to make it not suck at Greenlandic.
  - orbital-decay 11mo ago
    What makes Greenlandic special among ~7000 languages in the world? Most of them are low-resource as well. To train a model in all of them you also need a ton of specialized linguists and ML people, neither of which grow on trees. And it's only one thing generalist models are supposed to master, out of many. The scale is impossible, this needs to be done by models themselves when (if) they get smart enough.
bradley13 11mo ago
I've lived in a couple of countries where there is a "vulnerable" language. I understand the emotional attachment that the native speakers have to their language. However, in the larger picture: languages evolve. New ones develop, old ones die. Do artificial attempts to "rescue" a language really make sense?
- tdeck 11mo ago
  It makes no less sense than any other work done to protect or restore something created by human beings. This comment is no more insightful than saying "cathedrals burn down, do artificial attempts to 'restore them' make sense?"
- mort96 11mo ago
  Languages evolve, but it's probably bad when language evolution is driven by bad AI slop translations made by people who have no relation to the language.
- internet_points 11mo ago
  The AI slopwave is about as close to natural linguistic evolution as world war 2 was to natural selection (..aaand there we hit godwin's law, I'll see myself out)
Hendrikto 11mo ago
Wow, fuck that site. I had to dismiss 2 cookie banners and 3 popups before I could even read anything, then the second I scrolled one pixel another one popped up.
- Pooge 11mo ago
  Sounds like you don't use the modern-day condom: uBlock Origin. I live in Europe (famous place for becoming professional banner clicker) and I didn't get one single distraction.
  - Hendrikto 11mo ago
    I am on mobile, I should have said that.
    - user205738 11mo ago
      ublock origin works on mobile in Firefox, Waterfox, etc. There is Brave with its blocker, there is AdGuard, which blocks ads on websites and applications, regardless of the browser.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
- tim333 11mo ago
  That's odd. I didn't get much.
r2vcap 11mo ago
While it makes sense that LLMs and machine translation systems primarily rely on English Wikipedia as a data source, depending on smaller-language Wikipedias for training is far less ideal. English Wikipedia is generally well-regulated by its community, but many other language editions are not — so treating all of Wikipedia as an authoritative source is misguided. For instance, my mother tongue’s Wikipedia (Korean Wikipedia) suffers from serious governance issues. The community often rejects outside contributors, and many experienced editors have already moved to alternative platforms. As a result, I sometimes get mixed, low-quality responses in my native language when using LLMs. Ultimately, we need high-quality open data. Yet most Korean-language content is locked behind walled gardens run by chaebols like Naver and Kakao — and now they’re lobbying the government to fund their own “sovereign AI” projects. It’s a lose-lose situation.

131 points by kawera 1y ago

If nobody's reading them and nobody's writing them, then perhaps it doesn't matter. We could let Wikipedia-Greenlandic persist as its own evolved language that forks from the original. > potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them. OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use whatever languages are appropriate to them and we don't need to maintain them forever.

aucisson_masque 1y ago
I see that this comment get downvoted but I think we can agree on the facts that languages, just like species, die while other flourish. And that's fine. Survival of the fittest, right ? Not enough people speaking Greenlandic, too complicated even for it's own population who would rather speak danish ? The very reason I'm speaking English is because it was forced military during the 19th century by the UK and since the 20th by Hollywood. Just like a virus, if a language doesn't spread, it die.
- jiggawatts 11mo ago
  As an immigrant to an anglophone country, I noticed a few things: When people have varying levels of capability with languages, they’ll switch to whatever is the lowest common denominator — the language that the group can best communicate in. This tended to be English, even amongst a bunch of native speakers of a common foreign language. Moreover, this is context dependent: when talking about technical matters (especially computing), the Lingua Franca (pun intended) is English. You’ll hear “locals” switch to either mixed or pure English, even if they’re not great at it. Science, aviation, etc… is the same. Before English it was French that had this role, and before then it was Latin and Greek. The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere. International commerce becomes practical. Students can study overseas, spreading ideas further and wider. Books have a bigger market, attracting smarter and better authors. There’s a bigger pool of talented authors to begin with, some of which write educational textbooks of exceptional sparkling quality. These all compound to create a more educated, vibrant, and varied culture… because of, not despite the single language.
  - overfeed 11mo ago
    > The thing is, when the whole world speaks one common language like Latin or English, this is a tiny bit sad for some Gaelic tribe that got wiped out culturally, but incredibly valuable for everybody everywhere. I find this cultural Darwinism argument incredibly ironic, given how vocal factions in 2 of largest (native) English-speaking countries have been whinging about "their culture" being sullied by immigrants.
    - foxglacier 11mo ago
      It's not ironic that separate people (jiggawatts and US/UK nationalists) hold separate beliefs. But here's a thought. Are you ironic for being one person holding contradictory beliefs? I doubt you have the same contempt for all people who want to maintain their own culture. For example, I'm sure you don't think that New Zealand Maori who want to popularize the Maori language in New Zealand are whinging about it and you wouldn't describe Maori culture in quotes as "their culture", implying it's not really theirs or not really a culture.
      - overfeed 11mo ago
        > It's not ironic that separate people (jiggawatts and US/UK nationalists) hold separate beliefs You are correct, but I never claimed that as the source of irony. To set the stage, we have English-speaking nationalists (your term) who obliviously benefit from the rest of the world getting on board the English train at the detriment of their own languages[1] (never mind the circumstances). If we were to accept the language-Darwinism perspective at face value, watching the winning side being salty about (the effects of) winning is incredibly ironic to me. > I doubt you have the same contempt for all people who want to maintain their own culture. Merely observing an ironic situation doesn't mean I have contempt for any group of people. You feel very strongly about the subject and are reading into way more than what I actually wrote. 1. The French language board tries to fight a good fight against Angloisms, but it's a losing battle. Other languages have no structures holding them up, and lose dozens to hundred of words per year. English media is pervasive and incessant.
- don-bright 11mo ago
  We already see the 'best' LLMs switch between different languages while they are 'thinking'. It seems to me that the more languages it can 'think' in, the better off it will be. Different human languages have different concepts of time, numbers, nature, place, intention, relationships, and so forth and so on.
  - thaumasiotes 11mo ago
    > Survival of the fittest on a long time horizon means the more diversity the better the survival rate will be. This is just a misapplication of the analogy. For a language, "fitness" refers to similarity to whatever language is spoken by people relevant to you. Diversity is the worst quality a language can exhibit, and is the quality that causes dying languages to die. There is no such concept as an external force coming in that certain languages handle better, allowing them to temporarily outcompete other languages. Existing pools of diversity are not protective against this, because it can't happen. Also unlike genetic diversity, linguistic diversity does not need to be maintained as a legacy of the past. It is constantly being generated in much larger quantities than are desired. If you managed to perform the opposite of the Tower of Babel miracle and replaced every currently-spoken language everywhere in the world with a perfect monoculture, within 1-2 generations you'd be back to having mutually unintelligible varieties in different regions.
arthurjj 11mo ago
This was my take from the article also. These languages are clearly dying and not many people speak them as their primary language so the human suffering is minimal. Which means keeping them around is a past time that some people happen to enjoy (unless there is a Saphir-Whorf hypothesis I'm missing) But the sentence `well-meaning Wikipedians who think that by creating articles in minority languages they are in some way “helping” those communities` clearly shows the author hasn't really considered the issue.
phantomathkg 11mo ago
I thought the argument point is letting it die is OK, but letting wrongfully translated text, becoming the source of AI to chuck out wrongfully translated text is not OK.
- foxglacier 11mo ago
  Yea, it's kind of pure and good to delete it all. But I'm imagining some self-sustaining evolution of the language through an LLM-Wikipedia feedback loop.

ratg13 1y ago

It's ironic that the "solution" to the problem is being driven by yet another person that isn't native to Greenland. While they may be a Greenlandic teacher, it's almost assured that they are teaching western Greenlandic, which is similar to Canadian Inuktitut. People in the East of Greenland speak a language that has similarities, but is different enough in vocabulary and sounds that it's often considered a separate language and not a dialect. When people from East and West Greenland come together, they typically speak Danish because they can't understand each other in their own native language. So we're talking about a country that has 55k people and a portion of them don't even speak the official language.. This guy would have no way of knowing whether something was written poorly by a computer or a poorly educated greenlandic native that maybe isn't so good with the official language. Given that the majority of the country's citizens do not use the internet at all, it is not even clear what his solution is other than just deciding to be some sort of magic arbiter .. which is not realistic or sustainable.

optionalsquid 1y ago
> Given that the majority of the country's citizens do not use the internet at all On what do you base this assertion? I was not able to find up-to-date statistics, but 72% of participants in this survey from 2013 had internet access at home, either via PC or via mobile devices, and another 11% had internet access elsewhere: https://digitalimik.gl/-/media/datagl/old_filer/strategi_2018_2021/2013-borgerne--it.pdf https://digitalimik.gl/-/media/datagl/old_filer/strategi_201...
Uehreka 1y ago
I wish people on HN would stop acting like “magic arbiter” solutions are “not realistic”, when in reality it’s the only way things have every worked. Are federal judges “magic arbiters”? Yes. Do judges make bad calls? Yes. Do we not like when large numbers of judges who are unfriendly to our side get life appointments? Yes. Has anyone proposed an actual better way of solving these kinds of problems? No. So to get back to the point: Yes the solution is to appoint someone a magic arbiter, and hope they don’t screw up. The fact that it’s a deeply imperfect way of solving problems doesn’t mean it’s not workable. It just means it will backfire at some point, and someone else will get appointed instead.

simonw 1y ago

I'm surprised this story didn't mention the scandal with Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... > an American teenager – who does not speak Scots, the language of Robert Burns – has been revealed as responsible for almost half of the entries on the Scots language version of Wikipedia It wasn't malicious either, it was someone who started editing Wikipedia at 12 and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing.

fooker 1y ago
[flagged]
- AlienRobot 1y ago
  Yes, half of my entire political ideology is based on posts written by 12 year olds on the Internet. The other half is based on posts written by dogs[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
  - fooker 11mo ago
    Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.
    - aspenmayer 11mo ago
      > Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots. Please consider users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, as your nonstandard usage of nonstandard characters makes parsing your comment difficult if not impossible. Not a slight or a correction, as I am a fan of Zalgo text myself, but after being informed by others about how inscrutable it can be to the differently abled, I have reconsidered using it.
      - fooker 11mo ago

aucisson_masque 1y ago

> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with translated articles that contains error isn't much. They should instead close that version of Wikipedia until there are enough volunteers.

consp 1y ago
That last part creates a chicken and egg problem. You can argue about it but I will bet it will never get traction if there is no basis to start from.
- bawolff 11mo ago
  Wikipedia has an "incubator" setup where people can start working on a language in the incubator until it demonstrates enough interest.
Symbiote 1y ago
The end of the article says they have closed it.
Mars008 11mo ago
> who use AI translator or worst like Google translate It's the same. Google translate uses trained AI models.
tomlockwood 11mo ago
> they don't deserve to have one By what unholy pact have you been beknighted as the bestower of wikis, my friend?
- mslt 11mo ago
  Not the commenter but in this instance it seems like if you want something you need to either be able make/maintain it or fund someone who will, no?

johnea 1y ago

[flagged]

strogonoff 11mo ago

Wikipedia editors is among the many communities that have for a long time mostly successfully relied on the tendency of relatively superficial, easy to validate capabilities (such as being able to use a website, write something resembling real language, and handle basic communication) to correlate with more valuable but harder to validate qualities (such as ability to write reasonably well and follow rules/guidelines, and generally being a well-intentioned person) as one of their main barriers to entry. Attributable to the deluge of commercial LLMs[0] available at such low prices that their operators lose millions to billions of dollars in order to gain market share and ultimately profit, such communities may not be able to continue to exist as is for long, I suspect: either they would be forced to institute more intrusive barriers (be that ID verification, invite-only memberships, or something else) while the deluge lasts, or they may be effectively destroyed when members secretly lacking the requisite qualities and act in bad faith become a majority, damage community’s reputation, and drive out the existing members. [0] Which paradoxically to a significant degree exist thanks to the unpaid work of volunteers in many of such communities.

muldvarp 11mo ago
LLMs destroying Wikipedia would be incredibly sad and is one of the things that makes me think that LLMs will have a strong negative impact on the lives of most people.
- georgefrowny 11mo ago
  I have previously translated a very small handful of redlink articles into English from another language. Chasing down the sources in the other language and synthesising and cross-referencing with English sources is a fun challenge. To the best of my knowledge, I did an OK job. While translation tools are a godsend for that, as well as life in general when dealing with a language I am not that good at, LLMs make me increasingly reluctant to do that much more because there is no way I could detect AI slop in a second language. For all I know I'd be translating junk into English and enabling translingual citogenesis. Bad as the slopwave is for native speakers, it's absolutely brutal for non-native speakers when you can't pick up on the tells. Maybe the gap will narrow and narrow until the slop is stylistically imperceptible.

haiji2025 11mo ago

[flagged]

orbital-decay 11mo ago

That happens by default in low-resource languages, no bad translations needed. They don't have enough either written material to train an LLM, or labels for time periods and various dialects in a continuum. For example even the best multilanguage models will lump up all Berber languages into one unstable abomination nobody speaks, usually writing it in Neo-Tifinagh. Not much can be done about that, training a model in all varieties of these would require a huge specialized effort.

1f60c 11mo ago
And it's a lot more profitable to improve sex mode than to hire a small army of native speakers to make it not suck at Greenlandic.
- orbital-decay 11mo ago
  What makes Greenlandic special among ~7000 languages in the world? Most of them are low-resource as well. To train a model in all of them you also need a ton of specialized linguists and ML people, neither of which grow on trees. And it's only one thing generalist models are supposed to master, out of many. The scale is impossible, this needs to be done by models themselves when (if) they get smart enough.

bradley13 11mo ago

I've lived in a couple of countries where there is a "vulnerable" language. I understand the emotional attachment that the native speakers have to their language. However, in the larger picture: languages evolve. New ones develop, old ones die. Do artificial attempts to "rescue" a language really make sense?

tdeck 11mo ago
It makes no less sense than any other work done to protect or restore something created by human beings. This comment is no more insightful than saying "cathedrals burn down, do artificial attempts to 'restore them' make sense?"
mort96 11mo ago
Languages evolve, but it's probably bad when language evolution is driven by bad AI slop translations made by people who have no relation to the language.
internet_points 11mo ago
The AI slopwave is about as close to natural linguistic evolution as world war 2 was to natural selection (..aaand there we hit godwin's law, I'll see myself out)

Hendrikto 11mo ago

Wow, fuck that site. I had to dismiss 2 cookie banners and 3 popups before I could even read anything, then the second I scrolled one pixel another one popped up.

Pooge 11mo ago
Sounds like you don't use the modern-day condom: uBlock Origin. I live in Europe (famous place for becoming professional banner clicker) and I didn't get one single distraction.
- Hendrikto 11mo ago
  I am on mobile, I should have said that.
  - user205738 11mo ago
    ublock origin works on mobile in Firefox, Waterfox, etc. There is Brave with its blocker, there is AdGuard, which blocks ads on websites and applications, regardless of the browser.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
tim333 11mo ago
That's odd. I didn't get much.

r2vcap 11mo ago

While it makes sense that LLMs and machine translation systems primarily rely on English Wikipedia as a data source, depending on smaller-language Wikipedias for training is far less ideal. English Wikipedia is generally well-regulated by its community, but many other language editions are not — so treating all of Wikipedia as an authoritative source is misguided. For instance, my mother tongue’s Wikipedia (Korean Wikipedia) suffers from serious governance issues. The community often rejects outside contributors, and many experienced editors have already moved to alternative platforms. As a result, I sometimes get mixed, low-quality responses in my native language when using LLMs. Ultimately, we need high-quality open data. Yet most Korean-language content is locked behind walled gardens run by chaebols like Naver and Kakao — and now they’re lobbying the government to fund their own “sovereign AI” projects. It’s a lose-lose situation.