This worries me:
CNN translates politicians using AI.
In this clip, Macron is speaking French, but if you do not speak French, YouTube will switch the sound to an AI voice which sounds a bit like Macron.
So now, when an American politician is listening to the President of France, he is no longer hearing what a real, human translator KNOWS Macron is saying. He is hearing what AI GUESSES Macron is saying.
What happens, if AI gets it wrong?
@randahl It’s not CNN, but #YouTube doing this. I’ve seen this happen to a LOT of YouTube Shorts. I’ll see a short in which the people are talking in a weird, unnatural way, and I dig in and discover they’ve auto-translated it from Portuguese or something.
The insidious thing is that they don’t INDICATE anywhere that they’ve done this. This leads people to misattribute the audio to the original poster.
I really, REALLY hate this “feature”. It’s offensive. It puts words into the mouths of people who never said them, and lies by omission about it.
@randahl Hanlon’s Razor applies here IMO.
When #YouTube introduced this feature, and set the default to ON, it became easy for a publisher to forget to turn it off (which is probably why YouTube set the default this way). Why would a publisher expect their videos to be modified so fundamentally by a streaming host?
YouTube is doing this to probably millions of Shorts. Surely it’s not millions of publishers’ fault that this is happening, mostly automatically; it’s YouTube’s responsibility.
Randahl Fink
Dave Rahardja
Hannah