daughter asked me if the following impressions are correct

1) Google Translate is worse now
2) it's worse because it seems to flat out make up stuff
3) this must be because they're using so-called "generative AI", in a way their previous machine learning didn't
4) DeepL is also worse now for the same reason, but less so than Google Translate.

this is also my subjective impression of the state of things, but I have no idea how one would go about proving whether that's correct. it's not like we can get evidence of what's inside the proprietary black boxes

@elilla she’s probably right. We’d need to find a corpus of original and translated texts from the past, to compare if it is objectively worse. The reason would still be speculation, unless we find a Google employee who’s willing to spill.