Randahl Fink1d ago

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?

https://youtube.com/shorts/ps6lQxqOq5w?si=DxmFRNqHdnMWDEn1

'This is not a show': Macron criticizes Trump for Iran war and NATO comments

YouTube
Show threadDave Rahardja1d 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.

Show threadAlex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK1d ago

@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)

Show threadDave Rahardja1d 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.
Show threadAlex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
@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)
Apr 4 at 9:38pmWeb
Show threadxrvs1d 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)