> 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.

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ai-x 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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inigyou 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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smallerfish 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Google translate is primitive compared to Claude at translations.

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carlosjobim 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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numpad0 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's all the same, except LLMs are less precise with names.

	▲	edude03 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Googles machine translation team wrote the Attention is all you need paper that introduced transformers specifically to solve the problem that you can just model language by mapping one word to another. I'd be floored if they weren't using the tech they invented for intended purpose
	▲	carlosjobim 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Just like a car and a school bus are the same because both have four wheels?

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duffycommaryan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Language is incredibly complex. I remember a TikTok from a bilingual English-Korean speaker comparing the English subtitles from a Squid Game scene to what was actually being said by the characters. The nuance and info density lost in translation made the subtitles feel completely remedial. Americans were basically watching a different show altogether.

	▲	ClimaxGravely 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm by no means a native level Japanese speaker but I'm frequently surprised at how off Japanese-English subtitles can be.