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I strongly agree with this sentiment and I feel the same way. The one exception for me though is when non-native English speakers want to participate in an Eng
by sbrother 10mo ago
I strongly agree with this sentiment and I feel the same way.
The one exception for me though is when non-native English speakers want to participate in an English language discussion. LLMs produce by far the most natural sounding translations nowadays, but they imbue that "AI style" onto their output. I'm not sure what the solution here is because it's great for non-native speakers to be able to participate, but I find myself discarding any POV that was obviously expressed with AI.
- justin66 10mo agoAs AIs get good enough, dealing with someone struggling with English will begin to feel like a breath of fresh air.
- tensegrist 10mo agoone solution that appeals to me (and which i have myself used in online spaces where i don't speak the language) is to write in a language you can speak and let people translate it themselves however they wish i don't think it is likely to catch on, though, outside of culturally multilingual environments
- internetter 10mo ago> i don't think it is likely to catch on, though, outside of culturally multilingual environments It can if the platform has built in translation with an appropriate disclosure! for instance on Twitter or Mastodon. https://blog.thms.uk/2023/02/mastodon-translation-options https://blog.thms.uk/2023/02/mastodon-translation-options
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoMaybe they should say "AI used for translation only". And maybe us English speakers who don't care what AI "thinks" should still be tolerant of it for translations.
- kps 10mo agoWhen I occasionally use MTL into a language I'm not fluent in, I say so. This makes the reader aware that there may be errors unknown to me that make the writing diverge from my intent.
- sejje 10mo agoI think multi -language forums with AI translators is a cool idea. You post in your own language, and the site builds a translation for everyone, but they can also see your original etc. I think building it as a forum feature rather than a browser feature is maybe worth.
- pjerem 10mo agoYou know that this is the most hated feature of reddit ? (because the translations are shitty so maybe that can be improved)
- sejje 10mo agoI didn't, but I don't think it would work well on an established English-only forum. It should be an intentional place you choose, and probably niche, not generic in topic like Reddit. I'm also open to the thought that it's a terrible idea.
- monerozcash 10mo agoI think the audience that would be interested in this is vanishingly small, there exist relatively few conversations online that would be meaningfully improved by this. I also suspect that automatically translating a forum would tend to attract a far worse ratio of high-effort to low-effort contributions than simply accepting posts in a specific language. For example, I'd expect programmers who don't speak any english to have on average a far lower skill level than those who know at least basic english.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- emaro 10mo agoAgreed, but if someone uses LLMs to help them write in English, that's very different from the "I asked $AI, and it said" pattern.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoI honestly think that very few people here are completely non-conversant in English. For better or worse, it's the dominant language. Amost everyone who doesn't speak English natively learns it in school. I'm fine with reading slightly incorrect English from a non-native speaker. I'd rather see that than an LLM interpretation.
- Wowfunhappy 10mo ago...I'm not sure I agree. I sometimes have a lot of trouble understanding what non-English speakers are trying to say. I appreciate that they're doing their best, and as someone who can only speak English, I have the utmost respect anyone who knows multiple languages—but I just find it really hard. Some AI translation is so good now that I do think it might be a better option. If they try to write in English and mess up, the information is just lost, there's nothing I can do to recover the real meaning.
- guizadillas 10mo agoNon-native English speaker here: Just use a spell checker and that's it, you don't need LLMs to translate for you if your target is learning the language
- coffeefirst 10mo agoBetter yet, I prefer to read some unusual word choices from someone who’s clearly put a lot of work into learning English than a robot.
- buildbot 10mo agoYep, it’s a 2 way learning street - you can learn new things from non native speakers, and they can learn from you as well. Any kind of auto Translation removed this. (It’s still important to have for non fluent people though!)
- dhosek 10mo agoIndeed, this sort of “writing with an accent” can illuminate interesting aspects of both English and the speakers’ native language that I find fascinating.
- VBprogrammer 10mo agoYeah, the German speakers I work with often say "Can you do this until [some deadline]?" When they mean "can you complete this by [some deadline]?" Its common enough that it must be a literal translation difference between German and English.
- RankingMember 10mo ago100%! I will always give the benefit of the doubt when I see odd syntax/grammar (and do my best to provide helpful correction if it's off-base to the extent that it muddies your point), but hit me with a wordy, em-dash battered pile of gobbledygook and you might as well be spitting in my face.
- parliament32 10mo ago> I'm not sure what the solution here The solution is to use a translator rather than a hallucinatory text generator. Google Translate is exceptionally good at maintaining naturalness when you put a multi-sentence/multi-paragraph block through it -- if you're fluent in another language, try it out!
- smallerfish 10mo agoGoogle Translate doesn't hold a candle to LLMs at translating between even common languages.
- akavi 10mo agoYou are aware that insofar as AI chat apps are "hallucinatory text generator(s)", then so is Google Translate, right? (while AFAICT Google hasn't explicitly said so, it's almost certainly also powered by an autoregressive transformer model, just like ChatGPT)
- swiftcoder 10mo ago> it's almost certainly also powered by an autoregressive transformer model, just like ChatGPT The objective of that model, however, is quite different to that of an LLM.
- parliament32 10mo agoI have seen Google Translate hallucinate exactly zero times over thousands of queries over the years. Meanwhile, LLMs emit garbage roughly 1/3 of the time, in my experience. Can you provide an example of Translate hallucinating something?
- Teever 10mo agoEvery single time it mistranslates something it is hallucinations.
- lazide 10mo agoAgreed, and I use G translate daily to handle living in a country where 95% of the population doesn’t speak any language I do. It occasionally messes up, but not by hallucinating, usually grammar salad because what I put into it was somewhat ambiguous. It’s also terrible with genders in Romance languages, but then that is a nightmare for humans too. Palmada palmada bot.
- SAI_Peregrinus 10mo agoIf I want to participate in a conversation in a language I don't understand I use machine translation. I include a disclaimer that I've used machine translation & hope that gets translated. I also include the input to the machine translator, so that if someone who understands both languages happens to read it they might notice any problems.
- MLgulabio 10mo agoYou are joking right? I mean we probably don't talk about someone not knowing english at all, that wouldn't make sense but i'm german and i probably write german. I would often enough tell some LLM to clean up my writing (not on hn, sry i'm to lazy for hn)
- KaiserPro 10mo agoYou are adding your comments and translating them, thats fine. If it was just a translation, then that adds no value.
- jampa 10mo agoI wrote about this recently. You need to prompt better if you don't want AI to flatten your original tone into corporate speak: https://jampauchoa.substack.com/p/writing-with-ai-without-the-slop https://jampauchoa.substack.com/p/writing-with-ai-without-th... TL;DR: Ask for a line edit, "Line edit this Slack message / HN comment." It goes beyond fixing grammar (because it improves flow) without killing your meaning or adding AI-isms.
- estebarb 10mo agoI have found that prompting "translate my text to English, do not change anything else" works fine. However, now I prefer to write directly in English and consider whatever grammar/ortographic error I have as part of my writing style. I hate having to rewrite the LLM output to add myself again into the text.
- carsoon 10mo agoI think even when this is used they should include "(translated by llm)" for transparency. When you use a intermediate layer there is always bias. I've written blog articles using HTML and asked llms to change certain html structure and it ALSO tried to change wording. If a user doesn't speak a language well, they won't know whether their meanings were altered.