Mastodawn

Alexis Bushnell 1d ago

@randahl omg that is terrifying. As if politics wasn't frought enough right now

@randahl Is it politicians using AI, though?

Or is it youtube shoving crappy AI "translations" down its users' throats?

João Santos 1d ago

@jorgecandeias @randahl it's Youtube, there's an option to hear the original French if you look for it.

Robert 1d ago

@jorgecandeias
It is a "new" default setting from youtube. You have to switch manually each time to the original audio track.
(It doesn't appear everytime, seems to depend on the channel you are watching.)
BTW, I didn't find a way to switch off this grap permanently. So, if someone knows something, I am listening:-)
@randahl

@robertvonherz @randahl I got that dumb crap sorted out.

Via a browser extension called "youtube no translation". It doesn't work on the youtube app, though, so I no longer use the app. I just go directly to the site (via a web app) if I need to use youtube at all, or I view stuff on grayjay if I don't, which is most of the time.

Robert 1d ago

@jorgecandeias Great! Just installed it on Firefox - Desktop. Thx!

Philipp 1d ago

@jorgecandeias @robertvonherz @randahl if you are on Android, you could use #Newpipe.

@mastophilipp @robertvonherz @randahl Nah. I rather use #greyjoy

Gustavo 1d ago

@jorgecandeias @randahl Considering the amount of autodubs on YouTube, even from small channels, I guess it was forced upon people.

The irony, I guess, is that before YouTube doing that there were YouTubers doing that (e.g. ThioJoe) but one thing is the youtuber doing that and having complete control of each step (e.g. one could wire someone to translate and have the AI just dub if the translation quality being bad was the major issue), other thing is YouTube doing that and forcing into people if they can't even manage to generate automatic subtitles correctly.

@qgustavor @randahl The worst of it all is the absolute lack of respect shown for their users. It would be one thing to create the capability and ASK "do you want this"? And then RESPECT the answer.

Instead they just go "here, eat this crap, like it or not, and thank us for it"

gnaddrig 1d ago

@randahl
The question is not "if" but "how often" and "how bad". If my experience with state-of-the-art machine translation is anything to go by, there'll be enough mistranslations to cause a few adrenaline bursts in foreign ministries and presidential administrations.

Johan Wärlander 🦀1d ago

@gnaddrig
Yeah, that's.. worrying.

Sure, automatically translated audio is helpful when our 7yo is looking for Minecraft videos in Swedish that he can understand and follow along with. The stakes are low, and it's just for entertainment.

But politics, and most other news subjects, are something else.. Especially if the viewer doesn't fully get that they're listening to generated, inaccurate audio.

@jwarlander @gnaddrig @randahl

I spesk French (but had to manually select the language as YouTube assumes as I'm in UK I want English).

I often watch videos about car maintenance, which sometimes randomly end up in different languages to the original, and quite often there are glaring errors in the translations (they do get about 80% correct, but often the other 20% is important)

zombiecide　馬雄 1d ago

@vfrmedia @jwarlander @gnaddrig @randahl Car maintenance is one thing; political French is quite another. I'd always pick the analysis of an experienced foreign correspondent over my own patchy understanding (or better, alongside it), because while I know what they mean with 'Bercy', I know I lack many less obvious references. (CEFR C2 reading/ C1 listening)

@zombiecide @jwarlander @gnaddrig @randahl

Both require attention to detail - although I'm fairly good at political French as I was listening to France Info since 1980s (when it was on long wave radio), and where I live in England the FM signal reaches here quite often during certain weather conditions..

Khleedril 1d ago

@gnaddrig @randahl Not only that, but incorrect inflexions can change the meaning of messages, turning questions into statements for example. I'm not sure many American politicians are smart enough to understand that they will need to separate the meaning of the message away from its verbal delivery.

gnaddrig 1d ago

@khleedril @randahl
Absolutely. I translate technical texts, there is essentially just one register and nothing between the lines, but every now and then the machine pretranslation gets the facts wrong, sometimes dramatically so. Political speech is much harder to translate, and the stakes can be enormous, so this is not a good idea at all.

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/tech-journals/mokusatsu.pdf

Susi 1d ago

@randahl
"The story of how an ill-chosen translation of the Japanese word mokusatsu led to the United States decision to drop the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima" 😭

a.k.a. low-profile 1d ago

@randahl I've always lived by the adage, “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” - Edgar Allan Poe
(and even that doesn't hold water today)

GrapTops 1d ago

@randahl What worries me is your misunderstanding of what's happening and where to blame

ennenine 1d ago

@randahl furthermore, I also fear that we are normalizing and training the public to accept fake voices and awkward phrasing as normal and legitimate, softening them to accepting 100% fake/generated videos.

Matthias Bach 1d ago

@randahl it is even worse: YouTube does this whenever it thinks that the language in the video is not your native language. So even if you do speak French, you get the AI version by default unless YouTube thinks your are a native French speaker.

Jeffrey Rogers 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿1d ago

@randahl An American politician? Listening?

El Duvelle 1d ago

@randahl that's really bad, people with a YouTube account should report the video for disinformation

Sea 1d ago

Missiles over misunderstandings?

Lives lost in translation?

Claude was already blamed for the girls school strikes, as if we had forgotten the Pentagon's antagonism of anthropic...

How long will we buy these half-baked excuses for?

They're lying to us all, every day, and we stick around like an abused housewife, clinging to what?

It's time to plant our own food forests, the system has failed.

Henrik Pauli 1d ago

@randahl I'm pretty sure this is Youtube being a slop-forward pile of shit, rather than Macron crew being AI-happy.

(they can explicitly disable autodubbing, they may not know to opt out and how to)

Dave Rahardja 1d ago

@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.

@drahardja @randahl

I don't know if it affects folk who understand multiple languages more, but I've found YT randomly switches the language *and* subtitles, activating auto-translate when I don't want it (for instance a video of American mechanic comes up with auto-translated subtitles in German, but if I was watching a German video I'd leave the subtitles as they were without auto translate so I have 0 idea what they are playing at or why they do this as I've even put in some Google profile what languages I do understand)

Francis Hunger 1d ago

@vfrmedia @drahardja @randahl YouTube autotranslate is so annoying, there is even a plugin to prevent it, see: https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/ But the mis-representation problem as described by OP remains.

YouTube No Translation

Keep YouTube content in its original language with YouTube No Translation. A browser extension that prevents automatic translations of titles, descriptions, and audio tracks.

YouTube No Translation

Dave Rahardja 1d ago

@vfrmedia I wonder if it’s an unrelated bug. I’ve encountered cases where YouTube tries to be clever and auto-selects translations/closed captions that I have to undo. This is especially bad when I stream videos to my TV. It was a constant battle for a while.

@drahardja I think its two separate bugs, but both are from decisions where Google prioritises traffic/views and potential ad revenues over the actual wishes of the creators and viewers (and ignores the fact that folk might understand multiple languages to varying extents, so would make use of subtitles/translations but when *they* wish to rather than some algorithm)

xrvs 1d ago

@vfrmedia @drahardja they even do it when no translation is needed. my mom only speaks vietnamese and only watch videos in vietnamese and doesn’t need subtitles, but every time youtube turn it on no matter how many times she disables it, which obscure a part of the video with auto-generated subtitles that don’t even have coherent words (imagine 10% of the words are chopped off to just 1-2 letters)

Randahl Fink 1d ago

@drahardja I understand your point, but it actually is CNN doing this. Because every youtuber can disable the autotranslation, and CNN has not, likely because it is more expensive to use a human translator.

Dave Rahardja 1d ago

@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.

Hannah 1d ago

@randahl @drahardja and it got even worse in the last month or so since the auto translate mimics the voice of the original.

They also auto translate the title and description.

Hubert Figuière 1d ago

@drahardja @randahl it also assume people are unilingual.

saxnot 23h ago

@drahardja @randahl i also hate YouTube doing this

it alters the Original in ways never expected or predicted by the author

xs4me2 1d ago

@randahl AI is just a tool, there is no substitute to real knowledge, gained by experience. Certainly when it comes to cultural expression like language…

Kensan_Oni 1d ago

@randahl this drove me nuts when I first heard that about a year or so ago. I watch a channel that was pure Japanese, and it started to sub over it in English, and it was vile. I’ll accept text translations, knowing there is a chance they are wrong, but never translate without being asked.

I am disappointed (in the mildest terms) that this is happening again.

Dæmon S.1d ago

@randahl

An addendum: Youtube likely uses Google's own Google Translator under the hood, which in turn have been using Google Gemini under the hood, which in turn "glitches" quite constantly as part of LLM's working principles.

I mean, it's been more than a year since I decided to stop using Youtube altogether (I don't even use alternative front-ends and I actively ignore whatever Youtube link I may see/receive), so I can't say about Youtube's actual translation (I have only heard about it).

However, Google Translator is something I use quite frequently (even for English language, which I'm able to speak/read quite fluently; I use Google Translator in an attempt to verify and fix my grammar, given I'm Brazilian with a Portuguese-speaking inner monologue so I tend to formulate texts with a romance-y structure which may end up grammatically incorrect).

And it's been a while since I begin noticing how it changed (it became worse). Translations have been lacking clauses and sentences present in the input text; it's been struggling with parenthetical asides and texts between quotation marks; it's been struggling with romanization (i.e. transforming the approximate spelling for non-Latin languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese (three languages of which I sometimes tinker with for religious/esoteric purposes) into the equivalent text using Latin letters), among other inaccuracies.

Then I saw some news outlet revealing how Google Translate have not just been using Gemini under the hood, but it's also been "answering" injected prompts, as if Google Translate were yet another Gemini front-end.

So it's been unreliable. Unfortunately, it's the only translating engine capable of dealing with Latin (which I also tinker with sometimes), and the only one (at least the only "free" one) able to deal with long (more than 3000 chars) texts.

Given how governments around the world (yeah, not just yours, USians) have been "pivoting to AI" (which, IMHO, is not a problem by itself; the problem is when it's pushed down everyone's throats and smuggled onto places where it shouldn't be, and/or used for nefarious purposes), it's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when": "What happens when AI gets it wrong".

Diplomatic translations are the least of concerns, when we remember how air traffic control, command and control for entire LEO satellite constellations (to keep them in orbit while trying to avoid a Kessler syndrome) and even the maintenance of deployed-and-ready nuclear arsenals have been pivoting to AI, too.

I can guarantee you: it'll not be some diplomatic mistranslation to blame, but the future will be M.A.D.! 😬

Carolyn 1d ago

@randahl They also did that with a French senator railing against the orange regime. It was when I searched for a longer clip that I realized he hadn’t spoken in English. It had surprised me that he had, so something to be aware of now.

Rob Williamson 1d ago

When. And who's responsible when it happens?

Tock 1d ago

@randahl Amazon Prime has been doing this for a while, no warnings given.

"Excuse me, excuse me, Dan Blocker, are you in need of assistance?"

I'm watching Super Troopers, Dan Blocker has been dead for decades when this was shot. "Dan Blocker" should have been "bearfucker."

disorderlyf 1d ago

@randahl The fuck is the point of original audio if you're just going to shove this down our throats, YouTube? I don't NEED to speak the language to PREFER whatever language they were actually speaking. Especially for French where I'm not fluent but know enough of the words that it's harder to bullshit me on what they're saying if the statement happens to have words I already know or are phonetically similar to other words I know in different languages like, oh, I don't know, ENGLISH?!

That's presumably why you also auto-translate subtitles, but fuck me for preferring subtitles which are typically more accurate and quicker to roll out if actually done by a human.

mimiimim 1d ago

@randahl Very concerning for so many reasons

MeKobi 8h ago

@randahl check with Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Babelfish