8 ms·

"Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

479 points by speckx 5mo ago

TZubiri 5mo ago
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pixel_popping 5mo ago
I agree with the take, but it's a temporary one, the sad reality is that we will be literally inferior soon, there will be a point where we will not trust human input without counter check by AI, we need to remember that we are kinda at the beginning of the AI era, in 5 to 10 years it's very unlikely that a human translator or software engineers will do better than the tooling we will have. There is already a tipping point now in software engineering where we prefer to ask AI instead of humans because we believe accuracy will be better, see SO death as an example or just see the current state of online dev communities, it's getting deserted and between team members at work, we can also notice that people speak less and less. Sad but I believe it.
- horticulturist 5mo ago
  There’s no evidence it’s temporary or that AI is getting better. There was a big boost using LLMs to improve the quality of translation (after an often comical degradation using LLMs in the early days) but it’s completely plateaued. Coding is no different: LLMs aren’t any better, more tokens are being paid for, and the results are mediocre. People aren’t asking AI because it is better, they are asking AI because it’s fast and sycophant.
- Johnbot 5mo ago
  This is anecdata, but in my experience with myself and my coworkers, it is not that we believe the AI will be more accurate in software engineering, but that the answer will come faster and be more tailored to our exact problems. If I have to search SO, I have to find the answer and then tweak it to fit my codebase, but with AI tooling, the AI is already basing its answer around my code.
  - pixel_popping 5mo ago
    I think we actually do believe it, do you believe Fable 5+GPT-5.5(+ the whole model zoo) in loop with adversarial (no budget limit) or a 10-year experienced SWE? We are talking about "codebases" but realistically we won't even be checking the filetree of them soon, it will be all blind, containerized and verified with pseudo guarantees which are good enough to build serious things. We don't even write documentation for humans anymore, we need to look at the trends and the reality within companies, most developers became "callcenter agents" in a matter of only 2 years and literally most of them are not even using proper automated tooling yet as we can see the "vibe coding" trend with Claude Code which is weak, by far most work done daily by developers is already automatable entirely, but with exceptions, sure, but in a few years those exceptions will become rare. There will be niche problems about legacy products, sure, but legacy products will all be replaced over time, if we think in depth, why do we even need that many languages, that many tools? Tomorrow AI will write 99% if not all code existing ("code" doesn't even matter anyway), so it's much better if it's specific to AI and not playing this dance where we think we are doing a meaningful human contribution on an "AI-made codebase". For context, I have 2 decades of software dev behind me.
    - Ancapistani 5mo ago
      This is the direction I'm going. For personal projects that I don't plan to share widely, I'm making it a point to not look at the code at all. So far - and to my surprise - I've not only found that this has result in no more bugs than before, but it seems to result in fewer bugs over time. Every time I find a bug or a regression, I add it to the specification. My SDLC requires that every specification have at least one associated test. Not every function, or every line, or anything like that - every specified feature. The end result has been that my projects have matured over time much faster than if I'd been more closely involved. I've already toyed with writing some projects in Nim and Haskell for token efficiency. At some point I plan to put together a simple test project, then do a comparison of token efficiency with every language I can think of to find the one that I'm able to generate most quickly, correctly, and cheaply.
      - 5mo ago
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  > there will be a point where we will not trust human input without counter check by AI That's nonsense. There is zero reason to believe that AI (with the current techniques) will ever become reliable enough to let it do its own thing, let alone better than a human. It's been years of development and you still can't trust it to get basic facts correct, not even "well it's better than it used to be". Saying it'll replace humans in 5-10 years is a fantasy (or a prediction that people are stupid enough to fall for hype, I guess).
  - graemep 5mo ago
    It can spot mistakes made by a human if asked to review code or write tests. GP is is over the top ins saying humans will "be inferior soon" but AI can be a nice additional check so AI review might be come standard.
  - pixel_popping 5mo ago
    You come from the principle that humans are reliable at first which is partly right but also wrong in so many scenarios, you can even see lately the CVE spree happening, which demonstrates that human-made codebases have serious vulnerabilities and without the help of AI, we probably won't even know about them which proves that humans are not that "reliable", the current societal structure is also built around the fact that humans can't really be trusted, nothing really different with AI, we can't fully trust them like we can't fully trust humans. It's not a fantasy, I would bet that no serious engineer nowadays is putting in prod a codebase not AI reviewed meaning we already can't work on our own, we must factor in the on-going decline of human capabilities (at least developers) as well of course. I'm not really saying this because of any sort of hype, but I can personally relate where I went from actually coding to NEVER CODE in less than 2 years, and everyone around me is the same thing, what it will be in 5 years? Knowing that really, most developers aren't even using proper tooling yet so they are very slow compared to what they could be, I mean how many people we hear saying they can't even saturate an Anthropic Max 20 subscription? I saturated 7 accounts the last 2h alone, it's because they haven't entirely rethought their workflows yet, why do they even have "downtimes", it should be 24/7.
  - Ancapistani 5mo ago
- WillowWithAWand 5mo ago
  The thing is that AI is not some inevitable force of nature that must just be contended with and weathered. It is an active choice by our society to develop it and it is a choice by our society how we should use it, if at all. We would all do well to remember that and remember that each and every advancement and use case regarding AI is the result of choices by people (or the groups of people we call corporations) and are oftentimes motivated by the profit motive, not the best interest of humanity. We could make different choices up to and including our own Butlerian Jihad where we ban all forms of AI but we could also do everything we can to prevent the worst fallout short of that. There are only two types of problems in the universe: 1) those posed by the laws of physics 2) those posed by human choices The problem of AI is one of the latter.
- rootusrootus 5mo ago
  > we will be literally inferior soon This plague of misanthropic doom is itself pretty depressing. Why do so many people think LLMs are in any way on a path to compete with human brains? Why do you think so little of yourself? The brain is magnificent and complex in ways that we are unable to decipher anytime soon, and it does way more than an LLM. Way, way more.
  - pixel_popping 5mo ago
    I don't talk specifically about LLMs but AI in general, it's an important distinction because tooling is currently what make models useful and more performant. When I say we, I mean the general population really. There0-'ll always be the super bright ones, sure, but we gotta be realistic here. Most people already struggle to make any meaningful contribution because it's so hard to compete, and that gap is just gonna get bigger and bigger. I agree the brain is pretty magnificent, but when it comes to stuff like language, figuring out if an idea actually works, building the next LLM, or running business stuff, it's pretty obvious we'll be inferior. AI can already innovate and come up with new things way faster than any human could, so at some point (soon) => the majority of contributions are just gonna come from AI, not from us.
layer8 5mo ago
What’s unfortunate is that the market that is willing to pay for high-quality human translation has shrunken considerably.
- kevincox 5mo ago
  Is it that unfortunate? Tasks that don't require high-quality translation now don't need human labor. We should be celebrating. The sad part is that we haven't figured out how to distribute our resources fairly to these people even thought their services aren't required as often. Instead we just take their wages and give them to the top 0.1%
  - layer8 5mo ago
    It’s unfortunate because we are seeing more poor translations in all domains, and users suffer from it. It’s part of a general enshittification of things. There are few contexts where low-quality translations don’t constitute a degradation of user experience. Just one amusing example I saw recently: On the Amazon website, a submit button labeled “Go” in English was translated to something which when translated back would be “Walking”. That’s the kind of thing that would be exceedingly unlikely to happen with a human translator.
    - Legend2440 5mo ago
      I think you overestimate human translators. There is a lot of very poor quality human-translated text out there. English translated from Chinese is famous for this. There will never be enough expert-level human translators, and they tend to be very expensive. Machine translation has raised the floor.
      - kouteiheika 5mo ago
        > I think you overestimate human translators. There is a lot of very poor quality human-translated text out there. This. There was even a big controversy recently with one of the games on Steam where human translators just completely botched and vandalized the translation, mistranslating huge chunks of it and injecting their own personal politics which are not present in the original text (only English was affected; other languages were translated fine apparently): https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2914150/view/502856256328827730 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2914150/view/5028562... If you'd get the AI to translate it, even without any editing, it would have done much better job. Just because something's done by a human it doesn't automatically make it good; you still need competent people at the helm, and recent machine translation advances certainly raise the floor on that.
mapmeld 5mo ago
I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.
- xigoi 5mo ago
  > often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art. As one of such people, I think there is a nuance to it. AI is great when you’re translating something to yourself. But when translating things for others, more caution and human judgement is needed. Espesially when translating instruction manuals, where bad wording could cause someone to injure themself.
  - ai-x 5mo ago
    Exactly, it's never about absolute results, it's always Expected Value (Upside, given time/cost savings + Downside, given %reliability). So, every task falls under a spectrum
  - inigyou 5mo ago
    This. I put things through Google translate all the time and they're always unreliable. Sometimes they're correct, sometimes I need to know roughly what the original said. Infamously, Google used to say "geiler Typ" meant "horny guy" when it means "awesome guy". Google used to think "geil" meant "horny" in general, which it can but not usually
    - carlosjobim 5mo ago
      Google Translate is at the bottom of the barrel. All other AI translation tools are vastly superior. You'd want to evaluate those, and forget about Google Translate completely.
      - numpad0 5mo ago
        It's all the same, except LLMs are less precise with names.
ValentineC 5mo ago
From the post: > Ah, you can’t fire me, I’m self-employed! I don't understand thinking like this. I think companies can certainly fire their contractors.
- anotherevan 5mo ago
  Humour — it's so subjective.
tombert 5mo ago
I have no doubt that the writer is better at translating than AI, but I have to say that AI translation has gotten so good that I'm not sure how much longer translation work will be there, or rather it might end up being more about auditing. For example, I just read the Lawrence Ellsworth translation of The Three Musketeers, which I very thoroughly enjoyed. I don't speak or read French, but from my understanding Ellsworth's translation is considered one of the more accurate translations of the work. Out of curiosity, I sic'd Claude Fable on the original French version of The Three Musketeers and told it to translate accurately, but also try and keep the same jovial tone as the original and do not censor anything. After it was done, I didn't read the entire output, but I did compare a few individual chapters between the Ellsworth translation and the Fable translation. They were honestly remarkably similar. As far as I could tell, nothing was substantially different from the Ellsworth translation and the Fable translation. I do think that the prose for the Ellsworth translation was a bit better, but the prose for the Fable one was actually perfectly readable. Again, I don't speak French so I cannot say for sure, but I do not believe that I would have gotten a significantly different experience had I read the Fable version instead of the Ellsworth version. Now, it's possible (and likely) that this is somewhat self-fulfilling; Fable might have been trained using Ellsworth's translation and as such it's very directly able to crib from it; sadly since I do not speak any language outside of English, there's sort of a catch-22: the only way I can compare the accuracy of a translation is to compare against other translations, but if other translations exist then that will likely influence the results, and if a translation doesn't already exist then I have no way of auditing it. I'm still going to continue reading through Ellsworth's translations for the subsequent stories simply because that feels more canonical, and as I said I do think the prose was a bit better.
- eviks 5mo ago
  Your example doesn't prove your point because you can't even tell it's translation, but also because you said it was not better and are not using it.
- zuzululu 5mo ago
  This moment is coming for software developers too
Drupon 5mo ago
An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.
- ixtli 5mo ago
  I wish more people had casual exposure to professional translators. Its a deeply important, vanishingly small segment of the human population and has been this way for at least many thousands of years. Also, it will continue to be!
  - madaxe_again 5mo ago
    I’ve a friend who does simultaneous interpretation at the UN and she’s just… good god, how do you even do that. Oh, and she does it in six languages. And here I am, brain the size of a galaxy, and I fumble my way through every language I speak other than English. Serious respect for the linguists.
    - projektfu 5mo ago
      I guess I should have figured Marvin would be here on HN, feeling sorry for himself.
    - sandblast 5mo ago
      > brain the size of a galaxy Wow, aren't you humble.
      - AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
        It's a quote from Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
- bluechair 5mo ago
  My first rule—before doing anything else—when writing a sentence, is to check whether I could have removed the em dashes by re-ordering the elements. Update: in case it’s not obvious, I am sorry. I could not help it.
Seattle3503 5mo ago
Presumably the people paying the author for translation services are aware of AI, but for whatever reason are choosing a humans services instead. IMO it would be a form fraud to heavily rely on AI and not disclose that to the customer.
liquidise 5mo ago
> “Great. So, do you use AI a lot at work?” > “Oh, I can’t! It’s really not reliable enough.” Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again.
vulcan01 5mo ago
wrt. the end of the story, it will be interesting to see if people start noticing their Dunning-Kruger bias as a result of LLMs. Specifically: LLMs make it really easy to misunderestimate the complexity of fields other than your own. (You can see this with a lot of vibecoded projects, for example – once they hit the wall of complexity, they stall out or start finding ugly patches for fundamental design issues, etc.) I don't think this sort of cultural change will happen short-term, though.
- rootusrootus 5mo ago
  Agreed. LLMs are really terrific at sounding like they know exactly what they are talking about. Fable is the best yet. Beautiful, thorough explanations with absolute certainty, which under even light scrutiny turn out to be mostly bullshit. I still love the tool, but remain as convinced as ever that AGI does not lie at the end of this particular path.
- nzach 5mo ago
  > LLMs make it really easy to misunderestimate the complexity In my experience this is a real problem. Just yesterday I asked my LLM to create a piece of software that could help me build an 'ambilight-like experience' through my home assistant. It did something that seems to work as I expected, but there is a lot of theory that I just brushed past. It would be pretty easy for me to assume that I would be able to replicate this feature from scratch 'now that I understand the problem'.
analogpixel 5mo ago
All I got out of this article is that he should have went home and dumped it into chatgpt just to see what happened; then if it did as good a job as him, he should start looking for other places he can add value that AI can't.
- byronic 5mo ago
  she did. Did you remember to read the article?
  - bachmeier 5mo ago
    From the phrasing of the sentence, with the incorrect gender and the generic nature of the comment, obviously not.
  - int3trap 5mo ago
    The article does not say that. The author doesn't take the text the other person dumped into ChatGPT and evaluate its quality. That is what OP is referring to.
    - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
      The article clearly implies she has tried so previously.
      - analogpixel 5mo ago
        when someone says they have tried previously that makes me think once long ago when they first came out. If your employment could be replaced by this, I'd be testing all new models to see where they stand. Just because you don't want to use AI/LLM to translate, that won't stop someone else who will, and they will end up doing it cheaper and faster (maybe not better, but most people don't really care about quality too much anymore.)
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
JackFr 5mo ago
I worked at large Japanese bank in New York and happened to sit near Chief US Economist next to his Japanese translator. She would occasionally ask about certain idioms. I remember explaining what a wildcat strike was for instance. But it must have been pretty tough because the guy was prolific in his commentary.
aaroninsf 5mo ago
True, and relevant (I live with a professional editor)... yet I immediately think of Ximm's Law: Every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon. Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false. Lemma: contemporary implementations have already improved; they're just unevenly distributed.
- Planktonne 5mo ago
  No one assumes that AI systems won't be improved upon. What people don't assume is that progress will be infinite in every domain cheaply forever.
  - aaroninsf 4mo ago
    People don't make this assumption, if you ask (or reflect); arguments however regularly are implicitly predicated on exactly this premise. (Infinite improvement, no; enough improvement that practically speaking the difference between effectively free and free is meaningless—that may well be the ultimate bitter lesson.)
- edude03 5mo ago
  I think it can't be improved because it's measuring the wrong thing. A junior engineer becomes a senior when they stop being told what code to write and start solving business needs. Therefore often the highest paid engineers aren't the ones who would do the best on leetcode - or SWE bench pro verified. Maybe AGI is possible and we'll have software defined human intelligence that's completely autonomous but that's not coming in the next slightly better RL trained LLM and if existed likely wouldn't be under our control anyway
carlosjobim 5mo ago
Translating is one thing that artificial intelligence undeniably excels at, and the value of this alone is enough to underpin the trillion dollar valuations of the gigantic AI companies. Translation is a gigantic boon for business, but just as important for human connection, for culture, science, art, and entertainment. The value of automatic and cheap translation between all languages, this tower of Babylon, is immeasurable. Human translators will always be better than any AI at their job. But they don't have unlimited time and energy, and they aren't cheap. AI makes good to great translations available to everybody.
xp84 5mo ago
The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing. 2. AI is a terrible replacement for me - my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do. It’s a tool at best. This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it.
- holmesworcester 5mo ago
  Reminded me of this post by EY. (You're making a different point about existing expertise, not LLM expertise, but I think it holds in general.) Every month a new guy discovers LLMs; discovers a skill the current LLMs require to get good results; and writes about the future jobs that will always be available for smart people like HIM, that are SKILLED in using LLMs. The next generation of AIs doesn't need his fancy prompt. The image model goes from needing to type in just the right set of weird words and cryptic sorcerous invocations, to most people being able to type in English what they want and get a pretty good result. There are still tasks that require careful invocation. But they are a much smaller fraction of all the tasks people are trying to do, or you can get a bleh result without the elaborate invocation to get it really good. And to improve on the bleh result you need to be substantially more of an expert than back when the Guy was memorizing a rule about adding "trending on Artstation" to the image prompts, as would always require a human paid to do that. Another generation of AIs comes out. The next generation of Clever Skills is obsolete. Image models just obey the instructions for compositing panels without mixing them up, and you don't need to be an expert to get them to do it right. Another human value-add is gone. A wider set of tasks require no human expert. Now a new Guy notices LLMs have become useful in his field for the first time. He discovers they require SKILL to use CORRECTLY. He posts about how there will always be jobs for humans who are SKILLED in using LLMs like HIM. But it is not an infinite cycle. It is not the same each time it repeats. Now the Guy is a highly paid programmer or a career mathematician in 2026, instead of a graphic artist in 2023. In six months the models will no longer require his vaunted Skills. And by then there will be another Guy. But the process doesn't continue forever. The Guys are coming from fields that were harder and harder for AIs. The brief centaur eras are shorter and shorter. Today it is writers who are laughing at how bad the LLMs are at their job, and who will perhaps soon be posting about how it takes Skill to get an LLM to do their job Correctly. But the models are coming faster, and the eras of kinds of human value-add in each field are shortening. There is a point when you run out of Guys, either because the centaur eras are too short for people to develop SKILLs and post to Twitter about them; or because there are not lands left for AIs to conquer; or because ordinary people are not reassured by some Nobel laureate proclaiming there will always be jobs for Nobel laureates with the SKILLS to prompt robotized biology labs Correctly. But we'll never run out of amateur economists who assert entirely without a brief contemporary example that there will always be jobs for humans skilled at operating AIs! We'll run out of professional economists saying it when nobody is paid for that work anymore. I guess we'll also run out of amateur economists when they're dead. Source: https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2057136382817231151 https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2057136382817231151
athrowaway3z 5mo ago
So i assume this post is just a bit of writing out frustration, but i'm always hoping that "AI can't do it" posts to include examples. A list of "Examples AI will silently fail at" would be a lot more interesting, and might just convince your next potential client to _not_ use AI.
TekMol 5mo ago
AI isn’t replacing me. Like a toddler, it needs to be constantly coached. Like a toddler, it will grow up. Humans are really bad at noticing trajectories. They see the current situation. They know what the situation was 5 years ago. But for some reason they do not believe that there is a trajectory. They view the present state as the final destination.
- robertnowell 5mo ago
  head in the sand
- FromTheFirstIn 5mo ago
  It’s been basically the same for 3 years now. Are you sure we’re the ones who can’t see trends?
  - Ancapistani 5mo ago
    Your experiences must be much different from mine. Three years ago, AI was barely able to provide sort-of reliable command completion. Two years ago, it could extrapolate a single function from a docstring - but the docstring had to be so verbose that it wasn't practical to use in that way. A year ago, I was tinkering with Devin to try to find a way to get it to reliably implement small, isolated features from verbose Jira tickets. Six months ago, I started using AI to generate the majority of my code output. Most of my time was spent reviewing, and I was ecstatic to reach ~2x output because I could run the next task while reviewing the last. Now, at work I'm managing a half dozen Claude Code instances, Devin sessions, and orchestrating a review loop between Claude, Devin, and CodeRabbit. It's not uncommon for me to be working on four or more discrete features at once. My output is approximately 15x my pre-AI baseline - and I've not sat down and written a line of code directly in six months. At home I'm managing a Hermes agent that can spin up a whole fleet of purpose-tuned agents for whatever purpose I'd like. I've implemented spec-driven development a'la Acai, and extended it to the point that my agent creates specs from text or voice conversation, I review them, and it handles implementation end-to-end. The code itself is an almost disposable artifact - useful primarily to ensure no regressions have been introduced between rounds. ... I simply don't understand how you can assert that "it's been basically the same for 3 years". It absolutely has not.
deleted 5mo ago
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tiborsaas 5mo ago
It's quite ironic as the transformer architecture that powers most generative AI was invented for language translation :)
esafak 5mo ago
This is just about the worst career you could be in right now. Of course people are just going to upload it to ChatGPT. Processing text is its forte. This person is in the first stage of grief (denial); artists are several stages ahead. Most customers are not going to care about the difference in translation quality unless it's in a regulated sector.
- deleted 5mo ago
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unsignedint 5mo ago
[dead]
AnodicElegy 5mo ago
Out of curiosity, I pasted an article in French I was reading a few minutes before coming across this thread into ChatGPT and asked for a translation into English. It was certainly passable from a functional perspective, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it to translate an article from a language I don't understand. But it was not professional-quality work. There were a couple instances where the French grammar was mistranslated, and the writing was perfunctory, not going into any effort to have the article flow like it was originally written in English instead of simply translating each sentence literally. Would I read an article written like this? A short one. A novel? Definitely not.
- HDThoreaun 5mo ago
  I think the issue is that a lot of professional work is being done when the commissioner would be perfectly fine with non professional work. There will always be a place for artful translation, theres a place for hasty translation as well.
  - throw310822 5mo ago
    Especially when you get three assignments from 4 to 6 pm, all due for the day after. It's certainly literary translation they're after.
km3r 5mo ago
> Should you pay your roofer less because he uses a hammer instead of his bare hands? Yes. Effective tools increase the supply of roofs made. More supply means lower prices per roof. But because the same number of roofs need to get worked on, the increase in roofs per roofer means less roofers will be needed.
Chuzam 5mo ago
Who is gonna tell her?
ghusto 5mo ago
Sounds a aweful lot like the kind of things we were all saying before realising that we had to change what our jobs meant.
bwhiting2356 5mo ago
AI should be used for all the bullshit tasks that no one wants to do. There are garbage dumps full of stuff that can be reused and recycled. But it's not high enough ROI to pay someone $25/h to sort trash, so it isn't happening.
robertnowell 5mo ago
unfortunately this person will soon be unemployed.
robertnowell 5mo ago
unfortunately this person will soon be unemployed. not because their skills are no longer relevant, but because they are taking a principled stance defending now irrelevant skills.
- xboxnolifes 5mo ago
  Close. They will be unemployed because AI be "good enough" and companies won't care about it being better. Nothing they mentioned was really about principles. Everything was about quality output. Too bad companies dont care about quality.
  - karakoram 5mo ago
    Exactly, companies and even NGOs/charities that might be past clients of hers will only look at costs, not her experience.
    - robertnowell 5mo ago
      their number one priority is solving their problem so they can realize their organization's mission, and that's how it should be. if the translation is good enough to solve their problem, then it doesn't need to be any better.
loloquwowndueo 5mo ago
> If you ask me, nothing can save downtown Ottawa or North American public transit. Come to Montreal. Only 2H away and you can get by decently well without a car.
dmitrygr 5mo ago
Any expert in any field will gladly tell you that ML sucks for specifics of their field (and it does). But if you are not an expect in that field, it looks convincing enough to make you think that maybe it is OK for that field, and your field is somehow unique. It is not. Any expect in any field will confirm to you that ML produces plausible-looking slop which is occasionally completely wrong. This is the case for all fields.
yaky 5mo ago
I don't see LLMs being able to replace translators for less-spoken languages. I know a translator between two Eastern European languages, and some jobs require use of specialized dictionaries. Using LLMs in such cases would be very unreliable and would require even more effort to check and correct than doing it correctly in the first place. Plus, I really doubt that US tech firms are training LLMs on language spoken by "only" 6 million people. As for entertainment, anyone who grew up in Eastern Europe with pirated movies with nasal monotone translations, or machine-translated video games knows how much those take away from the experience. Sure, "AI could do better", but could it be consistent and capture cultural nuances and idioms, etc?
- jiehong 5mo ago
  Even more so for spoken-only languages.
- tim333 5mo ago
  I use Google Translate quite a lot and it's pretty good even for obscure languages. The voice to text thing on youtube videos has improved a lot in the last five years. Re. not training on obscure languages, the current thing seems to be to chuck all digital information available into the training so although they probably don't hire a human, the specialist dictionaries are probably in there.
jovial_cavalier 5mo ago
You don't even need to argue that you're better than the AI. The point is that the client could have uploaded it to ChatGPT too. Perhaps they even did, and they didn't like the answer they got. They are sending it to a human because they want a human to do the work. If you were to send back ChatGPT output, that would be fraud.
robertnowell 5mo ago
the version of this skillset that stays employed is "now I translate 10000x more than i could before by managing a fleet of agents. by encoding my experienced taste and judgement into robust evals, I've helped my ai translators be far better than chatgpt on its own, and much more cost effective compared to manual human translation"
atleastoptimal 5mo ago
You'd be laughed at if you said that ChatGPT could help you with graduate level mathematics in 2024, but this year, AI models on simple prompts are solving previously unsolved Erdos problems. It seems silly to imagine that there is some fundamental barrier between human intelligence and AI, and that AI could never do many of the things that humans can do. Inferring intent, gauging sentiments, factoring in cultural values, etc. all the things cited as stuff humans can do but AI can't, AI can currently do if given enough context. But more importantly, all those things aren't magical tasks that can only occur inside a human skull, they are a product of information processing, its just the information processing that has been hard to make computers good at, but so far it appears AI keeps getting better. I'm all for humans having special value that is not attached to their ability to perform useful work. However denying the abilities of AI models seems to be a common mistake many people are making, and sadly reality catches up to these people before they can emotionally prepare.
- jaggederest 5mo ago
  Fable has really spooked me, honestly. It's another big jump, but not in the actual coding. I was pretty comfortable with the "you do the implementation, I do the meta work and steering", and ... no steering required, no meta work required. Here's the backlog, let me know when it's complete, I guess I'm going to go touch grass until I have to review and refine... probably tomorrow? Reminds me of the first time I saw a coding agent stumble through an issue in 2023 maybe? and went "this is a big deal", similarly when OG gpt started making jokes that actually kinda worked. Updated modern version of the classic "make me a greentext", apologies for slop-posting, but it seems relevant: > be me > senior software engineer > in charge of making sure the tickets get, in fact, implemented > occasionally have to open the IDE and write some code myself > one day i open the IDE and the ticket is already closed > the agent did it overnight > no steering, no review notes, nothing left for me to do > distress.jpg > ask my manager what to do > he says "just focus on the high-level architecture stuff" > i say "what high-level architecture stuff" > he says "i don't know, you're the senior engineer" > rage.jpg > quit my job > become a prompt engineer, nice and simple, just tell it what to build > first day on the job, sit down to write the prompt > AI already wrote it
pazimzadeh 5mo ago
LLM's are in fact very good at translation and transliteration.
- Ancapistani 5mo ago
  Yeah, I agree - I get what the author is saying, but I also don't expect "translator" to be a practical career path in the future. Even small, dumb, local models are excellent at translation already. Frontier models are on par or better than the human translations we've tested them against at work.
- majdalsado 5mo ago
  Some would say that's exactly what they do best, learn a language and be able to transform across them. Hence, "language" model.
juancn 5mo ago
The most important thing a human translator does is certify that the translation is faithful. Period. You could do a machine translation if you want, but you better pore over every word in case you end up on the witness stand.
ibudiallo 5mo ago
Slight tangent into translations: I read two translations of the book "The Master and Margarita". My first read was so boring I couldn't help but stop reading before the end of the first chapter. I can't find the copy and the name of the person who translated it, but this one had all the Russian nicknames translated. It kept talking about a guy called homeless. I thought it was just a bad book and dismissed it for years. I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about with this book. But then, I stumbled upon the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. Although I don't speak Russian, I think this is as good as it gets. They did a phenomenal job. You can see the same effect with the mechanical translation of the book "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, where the government is called "United State" easily confused with the "United States". The translation that called it "One State" was so much better.
- anotherevan 5mo ago
  I still clearly remember in my early twenties being stunned to discover that the Astérix comics are originally written in French and then translated. Coming up with names like Getafix in English for the druid — incroyable.
- TheChetan 5mo ago
  I had a similar experience reading the “Count of Monte Cristo”. I gave up multiple times when reading the first translation.
- rciorba 5mo ago
  I read the first Dune books in Romanian, then re-read the first one in English, and I was amazed at how nice the translation was. I actually prefer it to the original. For example, stillsuit sounds really basic, but distrai, a portmanteau of "a distila" (to distil) and "strai" (old word for clothes) lands differently for me.
  - buggy6257 5mo ago
    Now I’m wondering if “still” is meant to be short for “distill”…
acyou 5mo ago
"we all more or less look the same in gym clothes" Maybe my brain works differently than the author, but I'm surprised at this statement. Gym clothes don't change recognition for me, it's about the face, body, posture, clothes don't really enter into it. For me it is nonsensical enough to be suspicious. And for a human centric perspective, not recognizing who someone is sad, it's knowing that you probably won't meet them again so it's not worth it, the community isn't there. Where community and interpersonal relationships between people are something we still hold dearly.
- zhuli 5mo ago
  I wrote the article. I'm a real person. And I'm shit at recognizing people I don't interact with. PIcture 50 of us in black legging in front of a mirror...!
  - anotherevan 5mo ago
    It's possible you have a touch of prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. It would make sense as you would recognise people you interact with more regularly by other things (e.g.: voice, or even body or posture as the grandparent comment mentioned), but unfamiliar people tend to me harder to identify.
    - zhuli 5mo ago
      Could be. Or maybe I'm more focused on the class.
karakoram 5mo ago
Safe to say OP just does NOT like AI https://correresmidestino.com/sorry-i-was-busy-unfucking-my-ai-fucked-life/ https://correresmidestino.com/sorry-i-was-busy-unfucking-my-... Poor woman should really look into pivoting her career or finding a different way of making money. Truth be told, her industry/career is not going to get better. Consistent work will just not fall from the sky. Being bitter will not improve her situation. Even organizations like UN/OECD are looking into implementing AI in various ways. Really good blog though. I love life blogs like these! You can go back and live through so many interesting/pivotal moments.
- thi2 5mo ago
  I wonder when this is posted about your or my profession.
  - karakoram 5mo ago
    Just to clarify, I am not saying this is a negative or offensive way. Just that she needs to proactively look into her options as I think its not going to get better, at least in the near term. To answer your question, I think its happening as we speak, in small ways for some and in big ways for others. Who knows really, either all this is a phase that pops with the AI bubble popping or something all of us will have to consider.
dyauspitr 5mo ago
This is all bullshit. I speak 4 languages, 3 fluently. Even chatGPT does a stellar job with translation. For most things people want translated- forms, administrative documents etc. I doubt you even need a human in the loop. That being said, something with essence like a novel definitely still needs to be done by a human.
dmaginas 5mo ago
[dead]
robmn 5mo ago
Denial is tangible
robmn 5mo ago
Denial isn't just a river in Egypt
d_runs_far 5mo ago
As a public service employee within the GOC, I feel the pain expressed by the author. I sat through a meeting today where somebody with no domain knowledge puffed up their chest to show off their gpt created master lesson plan for a four year long internal training plan that is being re-worked. I could feel the heads of those around the table that had been teaching this material for a decade starting to explode as this was exactly what others in the thread have described: it looked good until vetted by experts, then it was easy to poke holes as it was just not right The problem in the public service is that the experts who can review the output are leaving or being nudged out.
627467 5mo ago
I'm gonna sound a bit like the clueless gym hr lady: I assume most income generating translation jobs are either mandated by law or commercially high stakes enough to warrant a human to do, no? Were people really being paid to do the type off _low stakes_ translations implied that a automated system can replace? Maybe a publisher will replace the translator of the next Dan Brown best seller with Mythos? Who cares other than those buying it, getting money out of it?
antonvs 5mo ago
Jesus fuck, stop with the chatgpt written posts.
- zhuli 5mo ago
  No, I swear I'm a legit human!
r0m4n0 5mo ago
I say it’s a simple value proposition. A few examples Audio book narration. Human narrators are paid a seemingly ridiculous amount of money to literally read a book out loud. We have the tech to replace them, it’s actually pretty dang good, and it is substantially cheaper to do with computers. It’s pretty accurate too. In the audio book industry though, if you take your book seriously you have a real person read it. The best one you can find that you like. Readers enjoy hearing good narrators and the total value one narrator can bring is very high mostly because the value scales well. Another real world example that doesn’t scale well, call centers. Customers want humans, but execs have tried to replace them with automation in every way possible. The margins of a business get squeezed because the value of the human touch doesn’t scale well in this case. Translation falls a bit in the middle. I’m sure ChatGPT is good enough for some people. If you are a restaurant and need to understand what you are ordering at the local authentic Italian restaurant it’ll do the job. If you have a bad food allergy? Maybe not, you are willing to pay for accuracy because that’s what a human brings So the answer to the question posed in the article, can’t you just upload it to ChatGPT? Maybe yea maybe no
thi2 5mo ago
I recently saw a video showing the french to german translation of a french McDonald's terminal. The translations were hilarious bad, like old school google translate bad. Maybe McDonalds is big enough to not care about their reputation, maybe they are happy about the free clout from people making fun of them but they certainly chose to cheap out on translations. https://www.tiktok.com/@denneshow/video/7522160205501566230 https://www.tiktok.com/@denneshow/video/7522160205501566230
- Chuzam 5mo ago
  Likely wasnt done with an LLM ;)
tkgally 5mo ago
As a former freelance translator (1986 to 2005, Japanese to English), I have much sympathy for the writer. But I wouldn’t be so confident that AI cannot do professional-level translation. She writes: “I adapt, I localize, and I find the best way to convey the original message so it makes sense and feels natural. I research terminology. I make sure it’s consistent throughout.” I’m sure she has other important insights into what enables her to do her job well. The problem is whether or not such insights can be incorporated into an AI-driven translation system, too. Since early this year, I have been experimenting with a variety of agentic systems for language-related tasks, including dictionary-writing, research on topics in the philosophy of language, essay-writing, and translation. Other than the dictionary [1], I am keeping the results private, so they haven’t been evaluated by others. But my personal assessment is that agentic systems given suitable high-level guidance can be very good at such tasks now. If I were still freelancing and I had a large translation job to do for a client, here is the outline of the prompt I would give to Claude to get it started: “Use this private GitHub repository to build a system for translating [genre of text] from [Language1] to [Language2]. The directory samples/ contains examples of the type of document to be translated, high-quality human translations of those documents, and texts in [Language2] that are in writing styles that I believe to be appropriate for this genre of translation. The file guidelines.md contains my general instructions about the needs of my client and my preferences for how you should translate texts along various axes (natural vs. literal, informal vs. formal, preferred dialect in [Language2], consistency vs. variety in terminology translation, etc.). Begin building (1) a knowledge wiki for this project using Karpathy’s LLM-wiki framework and (2) a system inspired by Karpathy’s Autoresearch, AutoResearchClaw, etc. for testing and recursively improving both the functioning of the system and the quality of the translations. For the actual translation, editing, checking, etc., use not only your own ability and the knowledge assembled in (1) but also outsource such tasks to other frontier models through OpenRouter, and use adversarial evaluations among those models and yourself to check and recursively improve the system design, the prompt-writing for other models, and any translations created by the system. My OpenRouter API key is available in this environment. You may spend up to $xx per day in API calls until this project is ready to do real translations; before beginning a real job, give me an estimate for how much the API calls will cost for that job. The initial build-out of this project will take many sessions, so write a prompt called resume-prompt.md that I can point you to at the start of a scheduled Routine to have you work on this. Commit and squash-merge to main at the end of each session. I will be checking in occasionally to view your progress and to ask you to run translation tests, and I will offer guidance then on how to improve the pipeline further and make the translations closer to what my client needs. If you have any questions before you begin, please ask me.” [1] https://www.tkgje.jp https://www.tkgje.jp
GreenSalem 5mo ago
I had transliterated lyrics of a song * with stanzas in Urdu , Braj Basha, Persian and Arabic , that I wanted to understand better .. Gemini did a pretty good job of translating this to English . Sure a professional human translator would have done a more nuanced job if I was willing to invest the money and time . But ... * tajdar e haram originally by Payam Saihalwi, later versions by the Sabri Brothers and recently by Asif Aslam
- themafia 5mo ago
  Is the assumption that the LLM did the translation? Or that it just understood your query and submitted, on your behalf, to a tool you could have just used directly?
phendrenad2 5mo ago
Reminded me of this quote: "Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so." - Robert Heinlein In this case, the gym buddy doesn't think that she's an expert in the other field, but dismisses it as something ChatGPT can do with ease.
gizajob 5mo ago
I can’t believe this article hasn’t been written by ChatGPT. The author claims to have written it but has clearly become completely captured by the awful generic style of AI writing.
- zhuli 5mo ago
  Sorry but I did write it as a human. And as a humsn, it's a weird experience to have your words dissect by strangers. Interesting... but weird.
tapland 5mo ago
One of my parents tried this to beat a deadline for product packaging. There are now bags being sold marked "Lawn Suits", when it was supposed to be Lawn Topdressing
bch 5mo ago
Everybody else is a fungible cog. TFA is a good little read - couple things come to mind 1) Knoll’s Law [0][1] 2) The ways I feel when I’m working on a hard problem in an area of my expertise and some person starts in with “Why don’t you just…”. Enough people have come to me in such a situation with such a comment that I think it mostly translates as a sort of shibboleth for “I have no real idea what I’m talking about.” Now to find out if this is a teachable moment, if I have to maintain a sense of humour, or find out if I’m actually one of the days lucky 10,000.[2] [0] https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/ https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
hanzewei_asa 5mo ago
[flagged]
victor22 5mo ago
Marijuana ilegal
- zhuli 5mo ago
  Ah, a fellow Manu Chao fan!
  - defrost 5mo ago
    Sing something good to me, yeah.
zhuli 5mo ago
Hey guys, I just found out you were discussing my article, so obviously I had to come here. ;-) I’ll take the time to read the thread properly because, hey, you took the time to read my article. Also, I genuinely enjoy reading and I’m curious to see what you think about AI. The anecdote in the article is real, by the way. I only changed her title. With AI, I went from “surely this won’t affect me” to “AI is dumb” — no, I was dumb, I just didn’t know how to prompt it — and now I’m at the “how can I make it work for me?” stage, while still hoping employers, clients and, well, the entire world realize it’s NOT a magic button. It’s crazy how unreliable it can be. Sure, it can translate in the sense that it can give you an idea of what was said. But that doesn’t mean it’s good. I could give a million examples...
- epaga 5mo ago
  If you look at the trajectory of your stance, do you think you might reach "Uh-oh this is doing just as good a job as I can do in a much shorter time?" within the next year? I feel like that's what happened to pure coding for me, something I never ever thought would be possible. The unreliability is something that seems like it might be a temporary early stage.
- anotherevan 5mo ago
  Welcome to the crazy lolly shop that is Hacker News. Be warned though, as is written on many a candy wrapper: may contain nuts. Also, it is positively charming that you think most of us took the time to properly read something before coming here to espouse an opinion. :-)
  - zhuli 5mo ago
    Thank you for the welcome and reminder. It made me laugh. It's a weird experience to have strangers analysing your eriting and thoughts. Interesting but weird.
GreenSalem 5mo ago
Despite the protests, he admits using AI and then charging his clients full price... "But maybe I will ask Claude’s opinion, and if one of the suggestions is smart—cutting a paragraph, for instance, or clarifying a sentence—I might accept it. When I started translating 15 years ago, we used to paste uncooperative sentences into Google Translate to see if it had interesting ways to phrase things differently. Then came DeepL—same idea."
- zhuli 5mo ago
  Hi, it's me, I wrote the article! I'm a she, BTW. I do admit testing AI. Hell, most of the time, I don't have the choice anymore—I don't use it but several of my clients send AI-translated documents. Do I just send back a CHatGPT version? Hell no. This is why and how I know it's not reliable or good. It's not exactly taboo to use AI, is it? IT doesn't have to be all or nothing. AI is great for my glossaries. AI is shit to translate.
  - GreenSalem 5mo ago
    If your translation is as bad as your English, I really have to wonder what value you bring to the table...
    - zhuli 5mo ago
      Wow, a rude person online. Shocking. At least I have some reading skills, unlike you who started by stating I was a he.
stuaxo 5mo ago
We should rename AI psychosis The AI Delusion, since it's really about people being deluded (often that it can do everyone else's job not there's) and because ironically Richard Dawkins seems to have fallen fully into being fully deluded by it.
telesilla 5mo ago
This is all really nice but I have so many friends lost their translation and voice acting jobs that they are leaving for other fields, except for the high paid professional who have publishing and actor unions behind them.
hoherd 5mo ago
This reminds me of that scene from The Covenant: > You're here to translate. > Actually, I'm here to interpret.
panavm 5mo ago
[flagged]
cainxinth 5mo ago
> One of my clients has insane style guides, plural. I’m talking about 500-page documents detailing the proper way to format quotes and the one true way to insert footnotes. That’s absurd overkill.
zelphirkalt 5mo ago
Typical for HR. Not able to understand the qualifications of others, lauding AI, down-talking other people's work. The number of jobs I would have already gotten, if not for an HR person, who doesn't understand my qualification or the level of it, and if only they had asked a capable engineer to take one good look at my own projects, which I am exposing in my application documents ... The way HR people work, their work-ethics, and the way they do not work, is a huuuge problem.
semiquaver 5mo ago
“So it’s all Gell-Mann amnesia?” “Always has been”
ShengulYa 5mo ago
[flagged]
Markoff 5mo ago
Some of my clients use the LLM to do QA on my translations, dunno about English, but for smaller languages (think less than 10M speakers) LLM still ain't that good, at least 5-10% LLM suggestions contain hallucinated made-up words which don't even exist. I can see LLM usable for long paragraphs of text, legal documents, maybe even books if you don't care about artistic quality, but good luck translating software/UI with short strings with hardly any description/screenshots even human has trouble to figure out let alone dumb intelligence. I already told one of my clients who work for one of the major Chinese companies I can't guarantee quality of translation if they don't provide me variables description and all screenshots are in Chinese, so basically you are blind whether you are translating button, toast with instruction for user or page title, but seems client doesn't care... Nowadays I don't even bother explaining why are AI reports wrong, it would be huge waste of my time, if 99% are FP.
neuralkoi 5mo ago
Translation is an art. [0] Each of us carries a slightly different model of reality shaped by our genetics, society, and our subjective experience, and we try to share pieces of this model with others through a deeply flexible but inherently ambiguous medium called language. As I read [1] a bit into the Spanish conquest of the New World, I just can't help but think about how butchered the translations of the Spanish friar's "Requerimiento" to Atahualpa were [2]. A few words trying to compress 1500 years of Christianity and European society structure. How did the native translator (who had only spent a few years with the Spanish crew) translate "Church" and how did the natives interpret/imagine it? I've also been reading the Tao Te Ching lately, and I find it fascinating authors are able to "translate" the original even though they don't speak Chinese. That is, they have read in between the lines of the existing translations and eeked out the "juice" of the original or at least the truth the author tried to communicate. [0] https://scroll.in/article/876969/what-makes-a-translation-great-ten-literary-translators-from-across-the-world-weigh-in https://scroll.in/article/876969/what-makes-a-translation-gr... [1] The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513
Havoc 5mo ago
Think it depends on the client base tbh. I know one professional translator who got wiped out. And that happened before powerful GPT style translation. The reason the english on your new toasters manual is broken is because that is good enough for 90%+ of use cases. If OP is getting 500 page style guides he's clearly in the 10% rather than the Karen's assumption about translators being wrong.

479 points by speckx 5mo ago

—

I agree with the take, but it's a temporary one, the sad reality is that we will be literally inferior soon, there will be a point where we will not trust human input without counter check by AI, we need to remember that we are kinda at the beginning of the AI era, in 5 to 10 years it's very unlikely that a human translator or software engineers will do better than the tooling we will have. There is already a tipping point now in software engineering where we prefer to ask AI instead of humans because we believe accuracy will be better, see SO death as an example or just see the current state of online dev communities, it's getting deserted and between team members at work, we can also notice that people speak less and less. Sad but I believe it.

horticulturist 5mo ago
There’s no evidence it’s temporary or that AI is getting better. There was a big boost using LLMs to improve the quality of translation (after an often comical degradation using LLMs in the early days) but it’s completely plateaued. Coding is no different: LLMs aren’t any better, more tokens are being paid for, and the results are mediocre. People aren’t asking AI because it is better, they are asking AI because it’s fast and sycophant.
Johnbot 5mo ago
This is anecdata, but in my experience with myself and my coworkers, it is not that we believe the AI will be more accurate in software engineering, but that the answer will come faster and be more tailored to our exact problems. If I have to search SO, I have to find the answer and then tweak it to fit my codebase, but with AI tooling, the AI is already basing its answer around my code.
- pixel_popping 5mo ago
  I think we actually do believe it, do you believe Fable 5+GPT-5.5(+ the whole model zoo) in loop with adversarial (no budget limit) or a 10-year experienced SWE? We are talking about "codebases" but realistically we won't even be checking the filetree of them soon, it will be all blind, containerized and verified with pseudo guarantees which are good enough to build serious things. We don't even write documentation for humans anymore, we need to look at the trends and the reality within companies, most developers became "callcenter agents" in a matter of only 2 years and literally most of them are not even using proper automated tooling yet as we can see the "vibe coding" trend with Claude Code which is weak, by far most work done daily by developers is already automatable entirely, but with exceptions, sure, but in a few years those exceptions will become rare. There will be niche problems about legacy products, sure, but legacy products will all be replaced over time, if we think in depth, why do we even need that many languages, that many tools? Tomorrow AI will write 99% if not all code existing ("code" doesn't even matter anyway), so it's much better if it's specific to AI and not playing this dance where we think we are doing a meaningful human contribution on an "AI-made codebase". For context, I have 2 decades of software dev behind me.
  - Ancapistani 5mo ago
    This is the direction I'm going. For personal projects that I don't plan to share widely, I'm making it a point to not look at the code at all. So far - and to my surprise - I've not only found that this has result in no more bugs than before, but it seems to result in fewer bugs over time. Every time I find a bug or a regression, I add it to the specification. My SDLC requires that every specification have at least one associated test. Not every function, or every line, or anything like that - every specified feature. The end result has been that my projects have matured over time much faster than if I'd been more closely involved. I've already toyed with writing some projects in Nim and Haskell for token efficiency. At some point I plan to put together a simple test project, then do a comparison of token efficiency with every language I can think of to find the one that I'm able to generate most quickly, correctly, and cheaply.
    - 5mo ago
bigstrat2003 5mo ago
> there will be a point where we will not trust human input without counter check by AI That's nonsense. There is zero reason to believe that AI (with the current techniques) will ever become reliable enough to let it do its own thing, let alone better than a human. It's been years of development and you still can't trust it to get basic facts correct, not even "well it's better than it used to be". Saying it'll replace humans in 5-10 years is a fantasy (or a prediction that people are stupid enough to fall for hype, I guess).
- graemep 5mo ago
  It can spot mistakes made by a human if asked to review code or write tests. GP is is over the top ins saying humans will "be inferior soon" but AI can be a nice additional check so AI review might be come standard.
- pixel_popping 5mo ago
  You come from the principle that humans are reliable at first which is partly right but also wrong in so many scenarios, you can even see lately the CVE spree happening, which demonstrates that human-made codebases have serious vulnerabilities and without the help of AI, we probably won't even know about them which proves that humans are not that "reliable", the current societal structure is also built around the fact that humans can't really be trusted, nothing really different with AI, we can't fully trust them like we can't fully trust humans. It's not a fantasy, I would bet that no serious engineer nowadays is putting in prod a codebase not AI reviewed meaning we already can't work on our own, we must factor in the on-going decline of human capabilities (at least developers) as well of course. I'm not really saying this because of any sort of hype, but I can personally relate where I went from actually coding to NEVER CODE in less than 2 years, and everyone around me is the same thing, what it will be in 5 years? Knowing that really, most developers aren't even using proper tooling yet so they are very slow compared to what they could be, I mean how many people we hear saying they can't even saturate an Anthropic Max 20 subscription? I saturated 7 accounts the last 2h alone, it's because they haven't entirely rethought their workflows yet, why do they even have "downtimes", it should be 24/7.
- Ancapistani 5mo ago
WillowWithAWand 5mo ago
The thing is that AI is not some inevitable force of nature that must just be contended with and weathered. It is an active choice by our society to develop it and it is a choice by our society how we should use it, if at all. We would all do well to remember that and remember that each and every advancement and use case regarding AI is the result of choices by people (or the groups of people we call corporations) and are oftentimes motivated by the profit motive, not the best interest of humanity. We could make different choices up to and including our own Butlerian Jihad where we ban all forms of AI but we could also do everything we can to prevent the worst fallout short of that. There are only two types of problems in the universe: 1) those posed by the laws of physics 2) those posed by human choices The problem of AI is one of the latter.
rootusrootus 5mo ago
> we will be literally inferior soon This plague of misanthropic doom is itself pretty depressing. Why do so many people think LLMs are in any way on a path to compete with human brains? Why do you think so little of yourself? The brain is magnificent and complex in ways that we are unable to decipher anytime soon, and it does way more than an LLM. Way, way more.
- pixel_popping 5mo ago
  I don't talk specifically about LLMs but AI in general, it's an important distinction because tooling is currently what make models useful and more performant. When I say we, I mean the general population really. There0-'ll always be the super bright ones, sure, but we gotta be realistic here. Most people already struggle to make any meaningful contribution because it's so hard to compete, and that gap is just gonna get bigger and bigger. I agree the brain is pretty magnificent, but when it comes to stuff like language, figuring out if an idea actually works, building the next LLM, or running business stuff, it's pretty obvious we'll be inferior. AI can already innovate and come up with new things way faster than any human could, so at some point (soon) => the majority of contributions are just gonna come from AI, not from us.

layer8 5mo ago

What’s unfortunate is that the market that is willing to pay for high-quality human translation has shrunken considerably.

kevincox 5mo ago
Is it that unfortunate? Tasks that don't require high-quality translation now don't need human labor. We should be celebrating. The sad part is that we haven't figured out how to distribute our resources fairly to these people even thought their services aren't required as often. Instead we just take their wages and give them to the top 0.1%
- layer8 5mo ago
  It’s unfortunate because we are seeing more poor translations in all domains, and users suffer from it. It’s part of a general enshittification of things. There are few contexts where low-quality translations don’t constitute a degradation of user experience. Just one amusing example I saw recently: On the Amazon website, a submit button labeled “Go” in English was translated to something which when translated back would be “Walking”. That’s the kind of thing that would be exceedingly unlikely to happen with a human translator.
  - Legend2440 5mo ago
    I think you overestimate human translators. There is a lot of very poor quality human-translated text out there. English translated from Chinese is famous for this. There will never be enough expert-level human translators, and they tend to be very expensive. Machine translation has raised the floor.
    - kouteiheika 5mo ago
      > I think you overestimate human translators. There is a lot of very poor quality human-translated text out there. This. There was even a big controversy recently with one of the games on Steam where human translators just completely botched and vandalized the translation, mistranslating huge chunks of it and injecting their own personal politics which are not present in the original text (only English was affected; other languages were translated fine apparently): https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2914150/view/502856256328827730 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2914150/view/5028562... If you'd get the AI to translate it, even without any editing, it would have done much better job. Just because something's done by a human it doesn't automatically make it good; you still need competent people at the helm, and recent machine translation advances certainly raise the floor on that.

mapmeld 5mo ago

I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.

xigoi 5mo ago
> often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art. As one of such people, I think there is a nuance to it. AI is great when you’re translating something to yourself. But when translating things for others, more caution and human judgement is needed. Espesially when translating instruction manuals, where bad wording could cause someone to injure themself.
- ai-x 5mo ago
  Exactly, it's never about absolute results, it's always Expected Value (Upside, given time/cost savings + Downside, given %reliability). So, every task falls under a spectrum
- inigyou 5mo ago
  This. I put things through Google translate all the time and they're always unreliable. Sometimes they're correct, sometimes I need to know roughly what the original said. Infamously, Google used to say "geiler Typ" meant "horny guy" when it means "awesome guy". Google used to think "geil" meant "horny" in general, which it can but not usually
  - carlosjobim 5mo ago
    Google Translate is at the bottom of the barrel. All other AI translation tools are vastly superior. You'd want to evaluate those, and forget about Google Translate completely.
    - numpad0 5mo ago
      It's all the same, except LLMs are less precise with names.

ValentineC 5mo ago

From the post: > Ah, you can’t fire me, I’m self-employed! I don't understand thinking like this. I think companies can certainly fire their contractors.

anotherevan 5mo ago
Humour — it's so subjective.

tombert 5mo ago

I have no doubt that the writer is better at translating than AI, but I have to say that AI translation has gotten so good that I'm not sure how much longer translation work will be there, or rather it might end up being more about auditing. For example, I just read the Lawrence Ellsworth translation of The Three Musketeers, which I very thoroughly enjoyed. I don't speak or read French, but from my understanding Ellsworth's translation is considered one of the more accurate translations of the work. Out of curiosity, I sic'd Claude Fable on the original French version of The Three Musketeers and told it to translate accurately, but also try and keep the same jovial tone as the original and do not censor anything. After it was done, I didn't read the entire output, but I did compare a few individual chapters between the Ellsworth translation and the Fable translation. They were honestly remarkably similar. As far as I could tell, nothing was substantially different from the Ellsworth translation and the Fable translation. I do think that the prose for the Ellsworth translation was a bit better, but the prose for the Fable one was actually perfectly readable. Again, I don't speak French so I cannot say for sure, but I do not believe that I would have gotten a significantly different experience had I read the Fable version instead of the Ellsworth version. Now, it's possible (and likely) that this is somewhat self-fulfilling; Fable might have been trained using Ellsworth's translation and as such it's very directly able to crib from it; sadly since I do not speak any language outside of English, there's sort of a catch-22: the only way I can compare the accuracy of a translation is to compare against other translations, but if other translations exist then that will likely influence the results, and if a translation doesn't already exist then I have no way of auditing it. I'm still going to continue reading through Ellsworth's translations for the subsequent stories simply because that feels more canonical, and as I said I do think the prose was a bit better.

eviks 5mo ago
Your example doesn't prove your point because you can't even tell it's translation, but also because you said it was not better and are not using it.
zuzululu 5mo ago
This moment is coming for software developers too

Drupon 5mo ago

An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.

ixtli 5mo ago
I wish more people had casual exposure to professional translators. Its a deeply important, vanishingly small segment of the human population and has been this way for at least many thousands of years. Also, it will continue to be!
- madaxe_again 5mo ago
  I’ve a friend who does simultaneous interpretation at the UN and she’s just… good god, how do you even do that. Oh, and she does it in six languages. And here I am, brain the size of a galaxy, and I fumble my way through every language I speak other than English. Serious respect for the linguists.
  - projektfu 5mo ago
    I guess I should have figured Marvin would be here on HN, feeling sorry for himself.
  - sandblast 5mo ago
    > brain the size of a galaxy Wow, aren't you humble.
    - AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
      It's a quote from Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
bluechair 5mo ago
My first rule—before doing anything else—when writing a sentence, is to check whether I could have removed the em dashes by re-ordering the elements. Update: in case it’s not obvious, I am sorry. I could not help it.

Seattle3503 5mo ago

Presumably the people paying the author for translation services are aware of AI, but for whatever reason are choosing a humans services instead. IMO it would be a form fraud to heavily rely on AI and not disclose that to the customer.

liquidise 5mo ago

> “Great. So, do you use AI a lot at work?” > “Oh, I can’t! It’s really not reliable enough.” Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again.

vulcan01 5mo ago

wrt. the end of the story, it will be interesting to see if people start noticing their Dunning-Kruger bias as a result of LLMs. Specifically: LLMs make it really easy to misunderestimate the complexity of fields other than your own. (You can see this with a lot of vibecoded projects, for example – once they hit the wall of complexity, they stall out or start finding ugly patches for fundamental design issues, etc.) I don't think this sort of cultural change will happen short-term, though.

rootusrootus 5mo ago
Agreed. LLMs are really terrific at sounding like they know exactly what they are talking about. Fable is the best yet. Beautiful, thorough explanations with absolute certainty, which under even light scrutiny turn out to be mostly bullshit. I still love the tool, but remain as convinced as ever that AGI does not lie at the end of this particular path.
nzach 5mo ago
> LLMs make it really easy to misunderestimate the complexity In my experience this is a real problem. Just yesterday I asked my LLM to create a piece of software that could help me build an 'ambilight-like experience' through my home assistant. It did something that seems to work as I expected, but there is a lot of theory that I just brushed past. It would be pretty easy for me to assume that I would be able to replicate this feature from scratch 'now that I understand the problem'.

analogpixel 5mo ago

All I got out of this article is that he should have went home and dumped it into chatgpt just to see what happened; then if it did as good a job as him, he should start looking for other places he can add value that AI can't.

byronic 5mo ago
she did. Did you remember to read the article?
- bachmeier 5mo ago
  From the phrasing of the sentence, with the incorrect gender and the generic nature of the comment, obviously not.
- int3trap 5mo ago
  The article does not say that. The author doesn't take the text the other person dumped into ChatGPT and evaluate its quality. That is what OP is referring to.
  - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
    The article clearly implies she has tried so previously.
    - analogpixel 5mo ago
      when someone says they have tried previously that makes me think once long ago when they first came out. If your employment could be replaced by this, I'd be testing all new models to see where they stand. Just because you don't want to use AI/LLM to translate, that won't stop someone else who will, and they will end up doing it cheaper and faster (maybe not better, but most people don't really care about quality too much anymore.)
  - deleted 5mo ago
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JackFr 5mo ago

I worked at large Japanese bank in New York and happened to sit near Chief US Economist next to his Japanese translator. She would occasionally ask about certain idioms. I remember explaining what a wildcat strike was for instance. But it must have been pretty tough because the guy was prolific in his commentary.

aaroninsf 5mo ago

True, and relevant (I live with a professional editor)... yet I immediately think of Ximm's Law: Every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon. Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false. Lemma: contemporary implementations have already improved; they're just unevenly distributed.

Planktonne 5mo ago
No one assumes that AI systems won't be improved upon. What people don't assume is that progress will be infinite in every domain cheaply forever.
- aaroninsf 4mo ago
  People don't make this assumption, if you ask (or reflect); arguments however regularly are implicitly predicated on exactly this premise. (Infinite improvement, no; enough improvement that practically speaking the difference between effectively free and free is meaningless—that may well be the ultimate bitter lesson.)
edude03 5mo ago
I think it can't be improved because it's measuring the wrong thing. A junior engineer becomes a senior when they stop being told what code to write and start solving business needs. Therefore often the highest paid engineers aren't the ones who would do the best on leetcode - or SWE bench pro verified. Maybe AGI is possible and we'll have software defined human intelligence that's completely autonomous but that's not coming in the next slightly better RL trained LLM and if existed likely wouldn't be under our control anyway

carlosjobim 5mo ago

Translating is one thing that artificial intelligence undeniably excels at, and the value of this alone is enough to underpin the trillion dollar valuations of the gigantic AI companies. Translation is a gigantic boon for business, but just as important for human connection, for culture, science, art, and entertainment. The value of automatic and cheap translation between all languages, this tower of Babylon, is immeasurable. Human translators will always be better than any AI at their job. But they don't have unlimited time and energy, and they aren't cheap. AI makes good to great translations available to everybody.

xp84 5mo ago

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing. 2. AI is a terrible replacement for me - my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do. It’s a tool at best. This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it.

holmesworcester 5mo ago
Reminded me of this post by EY. (You're making a different point about existing expertise, not LLM expertise, but I think it holds in general.) Every month a new guy discovers LLMs; discovers a skill the current LLMs require to get good results; and writes about the future jobs that will always be available for smart people like HIM, that are SKILLED in using LLMs. The next generation of AIs doesn't need his fancy prompt. The image model goes from needing to type in just the right set of weird words and cryptic sorcerous invocations, to most people being able to type in English what they want and get a pretty good result. There are still tasks that require careful invocation. But they are a much smaller fraction of all the tasks people are trying to do, or you can get a bleh result without the elaborate invocation to get it really good. And to improve on the bleh result you need to be substantially more of an expert than back when the Guy was memorizing a rule about adding "trending on Artstation" to the image prompts, as would always require a human paid to do that. Another generation of AIs comes out. The next generation of Clever Skills is obsolete. Image models just obey the instructions for compositing panels without mixing them up, and you don't need to be an expert to get them to do it right. Another human value-add is gone. A wider set of tasks require no human expert. Now a new Guy notices LLMs have become useful in his field for the first time. He discovers they require SKILL to use CORRECTLY. He posts about how there will always be jobs for humans who are SKILLED in using LLMs like HIM. But it is not an infinite cycle. It is not the same each time it repeats. Now the Guy is a highly paid programmer or a career mathematician in 2026, instead of a graphic artist in 2023. In six months the models will no longer require his vaunted Skills. And by then there will be another Guy. But the process doesn't continue forever. The Guys are coming from fields that were harder and harder for AIs. The brief centaur eras are shorter and shorter. Today it is writers who are laughing at how bad the LLMs are at their job, and who will perhaps soon be posting about how it takes Skill to get an LLM to do their job Correctly. But the models are coming faster, and the eras of kinds of human value-add in each field are shortening. There is a point when you run out of Guys, either because the centaur eras are too short for people to develop SKILLs and post to Twitter about them; or because there are not lands left for AIs to conquer; or because ordinary people are not reassured by some Nobel laureate proclaiming there will always be jobs for Nobel laureates with the SKILLS to prompt robotized biology labs Correctly. But we'll never run out of amateur economists who assert entirely without a brief contemporary example that there will always be jobs for humans skilled at operating AIs! We'll run out of professional economists saying it when nobody is paid for that work anymore. I guess we'll also run out of amateur economists when they're dead. Source: https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2057136382817231151 https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2057136382817231151

athrowaway3z 5mo ago

So i assume this post is just a bit of writing out frustration, but i'm always hoping that "AI can't do it" posts to include examples. A list of "Examples AI will silently fail at" would be a lot more interesting, and might just convince your next potential client to _not_ use AI.

TekMol 5mo ago

AI isn’t replacing me. Like a toddler, it needs to be constantly coached. Like a toddler, it will grow up. Humans are really bad at noticing trajectories. They see the current situation. They know what the situation was 5 years ago. But for some reason they do not believe that there is a trajectory. They view the present state as the final destination.

robertnowell 5mo ago
head in the sand
FromTheFirstIn 5mo ago
It’s been basically the same for 3 years now. Are you sure we’re the ones who can’t see trends?
- Ancapistani 5mo ago
  Your experiences must be much different from mine. Three years ago, AI was barely able to provide sort-of reliable command completion. Two years ago, it could extrapolate a single function from a docstring - but the docstring had to be so verbose that it wasn't practical to use in that way. A year ago, I was tinkering with Devin to try to find a way to get it to reliably implement small, isolated features from verbose Jira tickets. Six months ago, I started using AI to generate the majority of my code output. Most of my time was spent reviewing, and I was ecstatic to reach ~2x output because I could run the next task while reviewing the last. Now, at work I'm managing a half dozen Claude Code instances, Devin sessions, and orchestrating a review loop between Claude, Devin, and CodeRabbit. It's not uncommon for me to be working on four or more discrete features at once. My output is approximately 15x my pre-AI baseline - and I've not sat down and written a line of code directly in six months. At home I'm managing a Hermes agent that can spin up a whole fleet of purpose-tuned agents for whatever purpose I'd like. I've implemented spec-driven development a'la Acai, and extended it to the point that my agent creates specs from text or voice conversation, I review them, and it handles implementation end-to-end. The code itself is an almost disposable artifact - useful primarily to ensure no regressions have been introduced between rounds. ... I simply don't understand how you can assert that "it's been basically the same for 3 years". It absolutely has not.

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tiborsaas 5mo ago

It's quite ironic as the transformer architecture that powers most generative AI was invented for language translation :)

esafak 5mo ago

This is just about the worst career you could be in right now. Of course people are just going to upload it to ChatGPT. Processing text is its forte. This person is in the first stage of grief (denial); artists are several stages ahead. Most customers are not going to care about the difference in translation quality unless it's in a regulated sector.

deleted 5mo ago
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unsignedint 5mo ago

[dead]

AnodicElegy 5mo ago

Out of curiosity, I pasted an article in French I was reading a few minutes before coming across this thread into ChatGPT and asked for a translation into English. It was certainly passable from a functional perspective, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it to translate an article from a language I don't understand. But it was not professional-quality work. There were a couple instances where the French grammar was mistranslated, and the writing was perfunctory, not going into any effort to have the article flow like it was originally written in English instead of simply translating each sentence literally. Would I read an article written like this? A short one. A novel? Definitely not.

HDThoreaun 5mo ago
I think the issue is that a lot of professional work is being done when the commissioner would be perfectly fine with non professional work. There will always be a place for artful translation, theres a place for hasty translation as well.
- throw310822 5mo ago
  Especially when you get three assignments from 4 to 6 pm, all due for the day after. It's certainly literary translation they're after.

km3r 5mo ago

> Should you pay your roofer less because he uses a hammer instead of his bare hands? Yes. Effective tools increase the supply of roofs made. More supply means lower prices per roof. But because the same number of roofs need to get worked on, the increase in roofs per roofer means less roofers will be needed.

Chuzam 5mo ago

Who is gonna tell her?

ghusto 5mo ago

Sounds a aweful lot like the kind of things we were all saying before realising that we had to change what our jobs meant.

bwhiting2356 5mo ago

AI should be used for all the bullshit tasks that no one wants to do. There are garbage dumps full of stuff that can be reused and recycled. But it's not high enough ROI to pay someone $25/h to sort trash, so it isn't happening.

robertnowell 5mo ago

unfortunately this person will soon be unemployed.

robertnowell 5mo ago

unfortunately this person will soon be unemployed. not because their skills are no longer relevant, but because they are taking a principled stance defending now irrelevant skills.

xboxnolifes 5mo ago
Close. They will be unemployed because AI be "good enough" and companies won't care about it being better. Nothing they mentioned was really about principles. Everything was about quality output. Too bad companies dont care about quality.
- karakoram 5mo ago
  Exactly, companies and even NGOs/charities that might be past clients of hers will only look at costs, not her experience.
  - robertnowell 5mo ago
    their number one priority is solving their problem so they can realize their organization's mission, and that's how it should be. if the translation is good enough to solve their problem, then it doesn't need to be any better.

loloquwowndueo 5mo ago

> If you ask me, nothing can save downtown Ottawa or North American public transit. Come to Montreal. Only 2H away and you can get by decently well without a car.

dmitrygr 5mo ago

Any expert in any field will gladly tell you that ML sucks for specifics of their field (and it does). But if you are not an expect in that field, it looks convincing enough to make you think that maybe it is OK for that field, and your field is somehow unique. It is not. Any expect in any field will confirm to you that ML produces plausible-looking slop which is occasionally completely wrong. This is the case for all fields.

yaky 5mo ago

I don't see LLMs being able to replace translators for less-spoken languages. I know a translator between two Eastern European languages, and some jobs require use of specialized dictionaries. Using LLMs in such cases would be very unreliable and would require even more effort to check and correct than doing it correctly in the first place. Plus, I really doubt that US tech firms are training LLMs on language spoken by "only" 6 million people. As for entertainment, anyone who grew up in Eastern Europe with pirated movies with nasal monotone translations, or machine-translated video games knows how much those take away from the experience. Sure, "AI could do better", but could it be consistent and capture cultural nuances and idioms, etc?

jiehong 5mo ago
Even more so for spoken-only languages.
tim333 5mo ago
I use Google Translate quite a lot and it's pretty good even for obscure languages. The voice to text thing on youtube videos has improved a lot in the last five years. Re. not training on obscure languages, the current thing seems to be to chuck all digital information available into the training so although they probably don't hire a human, the specialist dictionaries are probably in there.

jovial_cavalier 5mo ago

You don't even need to argue that you're better than the AI. The point is that the client could have uploaded it to ChatGPT too. Perhaps they even did, and they didn't like the answer they got. They are sending it to a human because they want a human to do the work. If you were to send back ChatGPT output, that would be fraud.

robertnowell 5mo ago

the version of this skillset that stays employed is "now I translate 10000x more than i could before by managing a fleet of agents. by encoding my experienced taste and judgement into robust evals, I've helped my ai translators be far better than chatgpt on its own, and much more cost effective compared to manual human translation"

atleastoptimal 5mo ago

You'd be laughed at if you said that ChatGPT could help you with graduate level mathematics in 2024, but this year, AI models on simple prompts are solving previously unsolved Erdos problems. It seems silly to imagine that there is some fundamental barrier between human intelligence and AI, and that AI could never do many of the things that humans can do. Inferring intent, gauging sentiments, factoring in cultural values, etc. all the things cited as stuff humans can do but AI can't, AI can currently do if given enough context. But more importantly, all those things aren't magical tasks that can only occur inside a human skull, they are a product of information processing, its just the information processing that has been hard to make computers good at, but so far it appears AI keeps getting better. I'm all for humans having special value that is not attached to their ability to perform useful work. However denying the abilities of AI models seems to be a common mistake many people are making, and sadly reality catches up to these people before they can emotionally prepare.

jaggederest 5mo ago
Fable has really spooked me, honestly. It's another big jump, but not in the actual coding. I was pretty comfortable with the "you do the implementation, I do the meta work and steering", and ... no steering required, no meta work required. Here's the backlog, let me know when it's complete, I guess I'm going to go touch grass until I have to review and refine... probably tomorrow? Reminds me of the first time I saw a coding agent stumble through an issue in 2023 maybe? and went "this is a big deal", similarly when OG gpt started making jokes that actually kinda worked. Updated modern version of the classic "make me a greentext", apologies for slop-posting, but it seems relevant: > be me > senior software engineer > in charge of making sure the tickets get, in fact, implemented > occasionally have to open the IDE and write some code myself > one day i open the IDE and the ticket is already closed > the agent did it overnight > no steering, no review notes, nothing left for me to do > distress.jpg > ask my manager what to do > he says "just focus on the high-level architecture stuff" > i say "what high-level architecture stuff" > he says "i don't know, you're the senior engineer" > rage.jpg > quit my job > become a prompt engineer, nice and simple, just tell it what to build > first day on the job, sit down to write the prompt > AI already wrote it

pazimzadeh 5mo ago

LLM's are in fact very good at translation and transliteration.

Ancapistani 5mo ago
Yeah, I agree - I get what the author is saying, but I also don't expect "translator" to be a practical career path in the future. Even small, dumb, local models are excellent at translation already. Frontier models are on par or better than the human translations we've tested them against at work.
majdalsado 5mo ago
Some would say that's exactly what they do best, learn a language and be able to transform across them. Hence, "language" model.

juancn 5mo ago

The most important thing a human translator does is certify that the translation is faithful. Period. You could do a machine translation if you want, but you better pore over every word in case you end up on the witness stand.

ibudiallo 5mo ago

Slight tangent into translations: I read two translations of the book "The Master and Margarita". My first read was so boring I couldn't help but stop reading before the end of the first chapter. I can't find the copy and the name of the person who translated it, but this one had all the Russian nicknames translated. It kept talking about a guy called homeless. I thought it was just a bad book and dismissed it for years. I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about with this book. But then, I stumbled upon the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. Although I don't speak Russian, I think this is as good as it gets. They did a phenomenal job. You can see the same effect with the mechanical translation of the book "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, where the government is called "United State" easily confused with the "United States". The translation that called it "One State" was so much better.

anotherevan 5mo ago
I still clearly remember in my early twenties being stunned to discover that the Astérix comics are originally written in French and then translated. Coming up with names like Getafix in English for the druid — incroyable.
TheChetan 5mo ago
I had a similar experience reading the “Count of Monte Cristo”. I gave up multiple times when reading the first translation.
rciorba 5mo ago
I read the first Dune books in Romanian, then re-read the first one in English, and I was amazed at how nice the translation was. I actually prefer it to the original. For example, stillsuit sounds really basic, but distrai, a portmanteau of "a distila" (to distil) and "strai" (old word for clothes) lands differently for me.
- buggy6257 5mo ago
  Now I’m wondering if “still” is meant to be short for “distill”…

acyou 5mo ago

"we all more or less look the same in gym clothes" Maybe my brain works differently than the author, but I'm surprised at this statement. Gym clothes don't change recognition for me, it's about the face, body, posture, clothes don't really enter into it. For me it is nonsensical enough to be suspicious. And for a human centric perspective, not recognizing who someone is sad, it's knowing that you probably won't meet them again so it's not worth it, the community isn't there. Where community and interpersonal relationships between people are something we still hold dearly.

zhuli 5mo ago
I wrote the article. I'm a real person. And I'm shit at recognizing people I don't interact with. PIcture 50 of us in black legging in front of a mirror...!
- anotherevan 5mo ago
  It's possible you have a touch of prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. It would make sense as you would recognise people you interact with more regularly by other things (e.g.: voice, or even body or posture as the grandparent comment mentioned), but unfamiliar people tend to me harder to identify.
  - zhuli 5mo ago
    Could be. Or maybe I'm more focused on the class.

karakoram 5mo ago

Safe to say OP just does NOT like AI https://correresmidestino.com/sorry-i-was-busy-unfucking-my-ai-fucked-life/ https://correresmidestino.com/sorry-i-was-busy-unfucking-my-... Poor woman should really look into pivoting her career or finding a different way of making money. Truth be told, her industry/career is not going to get better. Consistent work will just not fall from the sky. Being bitter will not improve her situation. Even organizations like UN/OECD are looking into implementing AI in various ways. Really good blog though. I love life blogs like these! You can go back and live through so many interesting/pivotal moments.

thi2 5mo ago
I wonder when this is posted about your or my profession.
- karakoram 5mo ago
  Just to clarify, I am not saying this is a negative or offensive way. Just that she needs to proactively look into her options as I think its not going to get better, at least in the near term. To answer your question, I think its happening as we speak, in small ways for some and in big ways for others. Who knows really, either all this is a phase that pops with the AI bubble popping or something all of us will have to consider.

dyauspitr 5mo ago

This is all bullshit. I speak 4 languages, 3 fluently. Even chatGPT does a stellar job with translation. For most things people want translated- forms, administrative documents etc. I doubt you even need a human in the loop. That being said, something with essence like a novel definitely still needs to be done by a human.

dmaginas 5mo ago

[dead]

robmn 5mo ago

Denial is tangible

robmn 5mo ago

Denial isn't just a river in Egypt

d_runs_far 5mo ago

As a public service employee within the GOC, I feel the pain expressed by the author. I sat through a meeting today where somebody with no domain knowledge puffed up their chest to show off their gpt created master lesson plan for a four year long internal training plan that is being re-worked. I could feel the heads of those around the table that had been teaching this material for a decade starting to explode as this was exactly what others in the thread have described: it looked good until vetted by experts, then it was easy to poke holes as it was just not right The problem in the public service is that the experts who can review the output are leaving or being nudged out.

627467 5mo ago

I'm gonna sound a bit like the clueless gym hr lady: I assume most income generating translation jobs are either mandated by law or commercially high stakes enough to warrant a human to do, no? Were people really being paid to do the type off _low stakes_ translations implied that a automated system can replace? Maybe a publisher will replace the translator of the next Dan Brown best seller with Mythos? Who cares other than those buying it, getting money out of it?

antonvs 5mo ago

Jesus fuck, stop with the chatgpt written posts.

zhuli 5mo ago
No, I swear I'm a legit human!

r0m4n0 5mo ago

I say it’s a simple value proposition. A few examples Audio book narration. Human narrators are paid a seemingly ridiculous amount of money to literally read a book out loud. We have the tech to replace them, it’s actually pretty dang good, and it is substantially cheaper to do with computers. It’s pretty accurate too. In the audio book industry though, if you take your book seriously you have a real person read it. The best one you can find that you like. Readers enjoy hearing good narrators and the total value one narrator can bring is very high mostly because the value scales well. Another real world example that doesn’t scale well, call centers. Customers want humans, but execs have tried to replace them with automation in every way possible. The margins of a business get squeezed because the value of the human touch doesn’t scale well in this case. Translation falls a bit in the middle. I’m sure ChatGPT is good enough for some people. If you are a restaurant and need to understand what you are ordering at the local authentic Italian restaurant it’ll do the job. If you have a bad food allergy? Maybe not, you are willing to pay for accuracy because that’s what a human brings So the answer to the question posed in the article, can’t you just upload it to ChatGPT? Maybe yea maybe no

thi2 5mo ago

I recently saw a video showing the french to german translation of a french McDonald's terminal. The translations were hilarious bad, like old school google translate bad. Maybe McDonalds is big enough to not care about their reputation, maybe they are happy about the free clout from people making fun of them but they certainly chose to cheap out on translations. https://www.tiktok.com/@denneshow/video/7522160205501566230 https://www.tiktok.com/@denneshow/video/7522160205501566230

Chuzam 5mo ago
Likely wasnt done with an LLM ;)

tkgally 5mo ago

As a former freelance translator (1986 to 2005, Japanese to English), I have much sympathy for the writer. But I wouldn’t be so confident that AI cannot do professional-level translation. She writes: “I adapt, I localize, and I find the best way to convey the original message so it makes sense and feels natural. I research terminology. I make sure it’s consistent throughout.” I’m sure she has other important insights into what enables her to do her job well. The problem is whether or not such insights can be incorporated into an AI-driven translation system, too. Since early this year, I have been experimenting with a variety of agentic systems for language-related tasks, including dictionary-writing, research on topics in the philosophy of language, essay-writing, and translation. Other than the dictionary [1], I am keeping the results private, so they haven’t been evaluated by others. But my personal assessment is that agentic systems given suitable high-level guidance can be very good at such tasks now. If I were still freelancing and I had a large translation job to do for a client, here is the outline of the prompt I would give to Claude to get it started: “Use this private GitHub repository to build a system for translating [genre of text] from [Language1] to [Language2]. The directory samples/ contains examples of the type of document to be translated, high-quality human translations of those documents, and texts in [Language2] that are in writing styles that I believe to be appropriate for this genre of translation. The file guidelines.md contains my general instructions about the needs of my client and my preferences for how you should translate texts along various axes (natural vs. literal, informal vs. formal, preferred dialect in [Language2], consistency vs. variety in terminology translation, etc.). Begin building (1) a knowledge wiki for this project using Karpathy’s LLM-wiki framework and (2) a system inspired by Karpathy’s Autoresearch, AutoResearchClaw, etc. for testing and recursively improving both the functioning of the system and the quality of the translations. For the actual translation, editing, checking, etc., use not only your own ability and the knowledge assembled in (1) but also outsource such tasks to other frontier models through OpenRouter, and use adversarial evaluations among those models and yourself to check and recursively improve the system design, the prompt-writing for other models, and any translations created by the system. My OpenRouter API key is available in this environment. You may spend up to $xx per day in API calls until this project is ready to do real translations; before beginning a real job, give me an estimate for how much the API calls will cost for that job. The initial build-out of this project will take many sessions, so write a prompt called resume-prompt.md that I can point you to at the start of a scheduled Routine to have you work on this. Commit and squash-merge to main at the end of each session. I will be checking in occasionally to view your progress and to ask you to run translation tests, and I will offer guidance then on how to improve the pipeline further and make the translations closer to what my client needs. If you have any questions before you begin, please ask me.” [1] https://www.tkgje.jp https://www.tkgje.jp

GreenSalem 5mo ago

I had transliterated lyrics of a song * with stanzas in Urdu , Braj Basha, Persian and Arabic , that I wanted to understand better .. Gemini did a pretty good job of translating this to English . Sure a professional human translator would have done a more nuanced job if I was willing to invest the money and time . But ... * tajdar e haram originally by Payam Saihalwi, later versions by the Sabri Brothers and recently by Asif Aslam

themafia 5mo ago
Is the assumption that the LLM did the translation? Or that it just understood your query and submitted, on your behalf, to a tool you could have just used directly?

phendrenad2 5mo ago

Reminded me of this quote: "Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so." - Robert Heinlein In this case, the gym buddy doesn't think that she's an expert in the other field, but dismisses it as something ChatGPT can do with ease.

gizajob 5mo ago

I can’t believe this article hasn’t been written by ChatGPT. The author claims to have written it but has clearly become completely captured by the awful generic style of AI writing.

zhuli 5mo ago
Sorry but I did write it as a human. And as a humsn, it's a weird experience to have your words dissect by strangers. Interesting... but weird.

tapland 5mo ago

One of my parents tried this to beat a deadline for product packaging. There are now bags being sold marked "Lawn Suits", when it was supposed to be Lawn Topdressing

bch 5mo ago

Everybody else is a fungible cog. TFA is a good little read - couple things come to mind 1) Knoll’s Law [0][1] 2) The ways I feel when I’m working on a hard problem in an area of my expertise and some person starts in with “Why don’t you just…”. Enough people have come to me in such a situation with such a comment that I think it mostly translates as a sort of shibboleth for “I have no real idea what I’m talking about.” Now to find out if this is a teachable moment, if I have to maintain a sense of humour, or find out if I’m actually one of the days lucky 10,000.[2] [0] https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/ https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Knoll [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

hanzewei_asa 5mo ago

[flagged]

victor22 5mo ago

Marijuana ilegal

zhuli 5mo ago
Ah, a fellow Manu Chao fan!
- defrost 5mo ago
  Sing something good to me, yeah.

zhuli 5mo ago

Hey guys, I just found out you were discussing my article, so obviously I had to come here. ;-) I’ll take the time to read the thread properly because, hey, you took the time to read my article. Also, I genuinely enjoy reading and I’m curious to see what you think about AI. The anecdote in the article is real, by the way. I only changed her title. With AI, I went from “surely this won’t affect me” to “AI is dumb” — no, I was dumb, I just didn’t know how to prompt it — and now I’m at the “how can I make it work for me?” stage, while still hoping employers, clients and, well, the entire world realize it’s NOT a magic button. It’s crazy how unreliable it can be. Sure, it can translate in the sense that it can give you an idea of what was said. But that doesn’t mean it’s good. I could give a million examples...

epaga 5mo ago
If you look at the trajectory of your stance, do you think you might reach "Uh-oh this is doing just as good a job as I can do in a much shorter time?" within the next year? I feel like that's what happened to pure coding for me, something I never ever thought would be possible. The unreliability is something that seems like it might be a temporary early stage.
anotherevan 5mo ago
Welcome to the crazy lolly shop that is Hacker News. Be warned though, as is written on many a candy wrapper: may contain nuts. Also, it is positively charming that you think most of us took the time to properly read something before coming here to espouse an opinion. :-)
- zhuli 5mo ago
  Thank you for the welcome and reminder. It made me laugh. It's a weird experience to have strangers analysing your eriting and thoughts. Interesting but weird.

GreenSalem 5mo ago

Despite the protests, he admits using AI and then charging his clients full price... "But maybe I will ask Claude’s opinion, and if one of the suggestions is smart—cutting a paragraph, for instance, or clarifying a sentence—I might accept it. When I started translating 15 years ago, we used to paste uncooperative sentences into Google Translate to see if it had interesting ways to phrase things differently. Then came DeepL—same idea."

zhuli 5mo ago
Hi, it's me, I wrote the article! I'm a she, BTW. I do admit testing AI. Hell, most of the time, I don't have the choice anymore—I don't use it but several of my clients send AI-translated documents. Do I just send back a CHatGPT version? Hell no. This is why and how I know it's not reliable or good. It's not exactly taboo to use AI, is it? IT doesn't have to be all or nothing. AI is great for my glossaries. AI is shit to translate.
- GreenSalem 5mo ago
  If your translation is as bad as your English, I really have to wonder what value you bring to the table...
  - zhuli 5mo ago
    Wow, a rude person online. Shocking. At least I have some reading skills, unlike you who started by stating I was a he.

stuaxo 5mo ago

We should rename AI psychosis The AI Delusion, since it's really about people being deluded (often that it can do everyone else's job not there's) and because ironically Richard Dawkins seems to have fallen fully into being fully deluded by it.

telesilla 5mo ago

This is all really nice but I have so many friends lost their translation and voice acting jobs that they are leaving for other fields, except for the high paid professional who have publishing and actor unions behind them.

hoherd 5mo ago

This reminds me of that scene from The Covenant: > You're here to translate. > Actually, I'm here to interpret.

panavm 5mo ago

[flagged]

cainxinth 5mo ago

> One of my clients has insane style guides, plural. I’m talking about 500-page documents detailing the proper way to format quotes and the one true way to insert footnotes. That’s absurd overkill.

zelphirkalt 5mo ago

Typical for HR. Not able to understand the qualifications of others, lauding AI, down-talking other people's work. The number of jobs I would have already gotten, if not for an HR person, who doesn't understand my qualification or the level of it, and if only they had asked a capable engineer to take one good look at my own projects, which I am exposing in my application documents ... The way HR people work, their work-ethics, and the way they do not work, is a huuuge problem.

semiquaver 5mo ago

“So it’s all Gell-Mann amnesia?” “Always has been”

ShengulYa 5mo ago

[flagged]

Markoff 5mo ago

Some of my clients use the LLM to do QA on my translations, dunno about English, but for smaller languages (think less than 10M speakers) LLM still ain't that good, at least 5-10% LLM suggestions contain hallucinated made-up words which don't even exist. I can see LLM usable for long paragraphs of text, legal documents, maybe even books if you don't care about artistic quality, but good luck translating software/UI with short strings with hardly any description/screenshots even human has trouble to figure out let alone dumb intelligence. I already told one of my clients who work for one of the major Chinese companies I can't guarantee quality of translation if they don't provide me variables description and all screenshots are in Chinese, so basically you are blind whether you are translating button, toast with instruction for user or page title, but seems client doesn't care... Nowadays I don't even bother explaining why are AI reports wrong, it would be huge waste of my time, if 99% are FP.

neuralkoi 5mo ago

Translation is an art. [0] Each of us carries a slightly different model of reality shaped by our genetics, society, and our subjective experience, and we try to share pieces of this model with others through a deeply flexible but inherently ambiguous medium called language. As I read [1] a bit into the Spanish conquest of the New World, I just can't help but think about how butchered the translations of the Spanish friar's "Requerimiento" to Atahualpa were [2]. A few words trying to compress 1500 years of Christianity and European society structure. How did the native translator (who had only spent a few years with the Spanish crew) translate "Church" and how did the natives interpret/imagine it? I've also been reading the Tao Te Ching lately, and I find it fascinating authors are able to "translate" the original even though they don't speak Chinese. That is, they have read in between the lines of the existing translations and eeked out the "juice" of the original or at least the truth the author tried to communicate. [0] https://scroll.in/article/876969/what-makes-a-translation-great-ten-literary-translators-from-across-the-world-weigh-in https://scroll.in/article/876969/what-makes-a-translation-gr... [1] The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513

Havoc 5mo ago

Think it depends on the client base tbh. I know one professional translator who got wiped out. And that happened before powerful GPT style translation. The reason the english on your new toasters manual is broken is because that is good enough for 90%+ of use cases. If OP is getting 500 page style guides he's clearly in the 10% rather than the Karen's assumption about translators being wrong.