“generative models are fine”

say you have no friends without saying you have no friends

if you had friends who are visual artists, musicians, writers, translators, or any other affected profession, your views would be different

@lumi

So, in your opinion were machine translators always a bad thing? Genuine question.

@cloudskater no, in case of genai i feel the problem with translation specifically is over-reliance. they still strip the humanity off everything

many people also do not understand the intricacies of translation and how nuanced it all is

good translations involve way more than just replacing words

@lumi @cloudskater I mean LLMs are also just worse for translation in many ways than the machine translations we already had prior. they have the same issues of not understanding context and nuance, but not just are they much larger models with more power use, they also are prone to just making stuff up too. which is not something you want in a translation. at the same time the output might look more polished, giving the impression of a better translation while sacrificing accuracy. I think that's actually very dangerous.

@lumi

Oh yeah I know translation is an art in and of itself, for sure.

@cloudskater yeah, it’s something many people sadly do not appreciate

i feel there’s even more people that don’t appreciate translations than people who don’t appreciate code. and there are many that think code has no artistic value (they are wrong)

@elexia @lumi @cloudskater

old machine translation didn't have context and sometimes used wrong words or didn't get the grammar right

llm based translation still doesn't have context but acts like it does anyways and is prone to just making up completely new shit that wasn't in the source

old machine translation was bad in predictable and noticable ways

llm translation can sneak in hard to spot mistakes and is extremely unpredictable

@sammy @lumi @cloudskater yeah you said exactly what we are getting at more clearly <3

@elexia @lumi @cloudskater I've had the misfortune of arguing about the "but what about translation" argument a few times before so I've spent some time on figuring out how to word this point ^^

@elexia @lumi @sammy

Are there any translation programs left that don’t use LLMs that you know of? Preferably open source.

@cloudskater @elexia @lumi no, sadly i don't know about any.

@cloudskater @sammy @lumi @elexia is argos translate/libretranslate using an LLM?