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 threadgnaddrig1d 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.
Show threadJohan 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.

@randahl

Show threadAlex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK1d ago

@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)

Show threadzombiecide　馬雄
@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)
Apr 4 at 10:44pmWeb
Show threadAlex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK1d ago

@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..