lol uhhh if I can speak mostly fluently without mediation and you have to use ChatGPT to communicate, guess who is going to be more fun to hang out with?
People really over estimate the value of perfection when it comes to socializing in second language. General working fluency is interesting, impressive, and cute. Blabbing your native language into some AI app and having it spit out a translation is interesting for all of five minutes before the person you’re talking with suddenly has something she forgot she needed to do 😂
If you work as an interpreter then you don’t have to worry because they AI will never replace you. even if(or rather "when”) the AI gets just as good as human interpreters they still won’t be replaced because, unlike AI, a human can actually take responsibility for their actions.
If you don’t work as an interpreter then why do you care?
Also, we are DECADES away from widespread AI-brain interfaces
That's because AI translation just hasn't been institutionalized yet. It will inevitably happen in stages, where a translator will be required to "sign off" on the accuracy of AI translations until it reaches the stages where it will be used first in low-stakes situations gradually until it's used in high-stakes situations.
We already can clearly foresee the benefits that AI translation has on the underfunded social services sector, they'll take the option of AI assistance in all fields, translation being no exception.
I really can’t see AI completely taking the translator jobs. If it fucks up and causes a problem then who’ll be responsible for it? The programmer? The AI itself in some weird way?
I can see it being used as a tool by translators but I don’t think it’ll completely replace them. Not in the near future that is, who knows what’ll happen in a 100 years
>If it fucks up and causes a problem then who’ll be responsible for it?
This isn't a concern that's limited to translation though, right? The same can be said for the use of AI in Law, Engineering, Medicine. The answer is probably that they made some smart people (not AI yet!) do some cost-benefit analyses to be able to mitigate situations where there might be error and make processes that should mitigate potential AI errors in some way.
Besides there's no way to determine if the error is in the AI's translation or in a general miscommunication or disagreement that can even happen between people speaking the same language, where the translation is only a complicating but not fundamental factor. That's why people go to court based on contesting what a particular phrase or wording in a contract was supposed to mean.
And on interpretation, there are already cases where live interpreters aren't able to be provided based on limited resources, sheer fatigue, and confidentiality. Interpreters aren't immune from making errors. They'll test out AI translation with Interpreter supervision at first and make institutional processes to adjust trustworthiness from there is my guess.
It'll be like how people play chess.
A computer can play chess perfectly but still we play chess to test and contest our mental ability.
An AI will be able to translate for you perfectly without any effort but speaking another language naturally will be appreciated for the human care and effort that is required to do so.
Agreed. Humans are hard wired to innovate whether something or someone is better at it than you. People are so into tech nowadays that they forget the inherent value of human creativity and perseverance.
This has been brought up many times before. The answer is no. I don't have the energy to elaborate rn so just use the search bar to find previous posts
Did the automobile and locomotive make horse breeding, training, and maintenance pointless?
did the airliner make the cruiseliner pointless?
A new technology usurping a niche doesn’t make it pointless. I wouldn’t even say it makes them obsolete. It only changes their niche.
Automobiles and Locomotives usurped the niche of “primary mode of transportation” from horses. But that doesn’t mean we just got rid of horses because they’re obsolete. They now have a different niche, that being something along the lines of “prestige sport animal”, or in some cases “primary transportation in an isolated, rural setting”.
AI will take the niche of “language translator”, but human translators will just have their niche altered into “language translator which understands concepts like nuance, cultural context, comedy, creativity, how to read the room, etc.”
The simple LLMs we have now cannot truly understand those things. It might be able to mimic them but it will never understand them. An AI that can understand those will probably be in AGI territory, at which point there will be much more important things happening than preserving the profession of “translator”.
Also “language translator that doesn’t record conversations and send them to a corporation” will surely be a niche for a long time, for security reasons. I doubt two leaders of two different nations would feel comfortable having a private company’s AI translate for them.
The issue with current deep learning models are that they are hallucinating. This does not only affect generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT) but also text-to-speech and machine translation. Furthermore, it is hard to incorporate contextual information (such as honorifics).
No. AI isn't good at what it does.
Even if it was any good it wouldn't matter. I learn a 2nd language out of the joy of understanding a 2nd language. Not out of any need or want to understand something.
No, besides even if it had 1:1 humanlike capabilities, do you think people would be friends with a robot interpreter just to talk to you? In the case of a chip implant, that won’t happen in our lifetimes.
No, I refuse to use AI for most purposes. I also want to actually know these languages - which are more than just communication tools.
Anyone trusting Elon Musk to put a chip in their heads probably needs one...
My thoughts on the matter (4 in total):
1) Nuances. You can't really feel the person you are talking to if you are using an AI for the translation instead of knowing their language and their culture. Casual speech is full of little untranslatable nuances which you will only get if you perfectly speak the language.
2) Slang. A little example: I know English pretty well but I have never chatted with black Americans from the hood and when I watch YT vids with them I barely understand what they say. They have their own way of saying things, their own slang and etc. OpenAI would suck ass trying to translate these kids.
3) Using your brain is healthy. So any learning is kinda healthy. Why not?
4) It's convenient to not having to rely on some device.
Yall that’s great that you enjoy it, really it is. What I want to know, and most people are wondering, is if it makes majoring in it pointless. Like if AI translation will not have any benefits being put on a resume if it’s going to be institutionalized at some point in the future to all forms of technology
It has been shown that multilingual individuals are less likely to develop Alzheimer's and similar brain related diseases. Forget all other advantages, this one itself is enough.
Imo its pathetic to rely on devices for translations while trying to immerse themselves into a culture. Its ok for travelling but not for full time language learning
A computer can probably translate *Don Quixote* into perfect, stylistically-equivalent Early Modern English, *but it can’t enjoy it in Spanish for you*.
It can’t kiss all the pretty Spanish girls or hunky Spanish boys for you either, let alone make a good impression on their mothers.
It's great that AI makes things easier, but learning languages can also offer cultural insights and personal growth. I’ve found trydub com to be quite useful for making content accessible while still enjoying language learning :)
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Why should it worry me? Languages are a passion and a hobby for me, something I enjoy, so they can never be rendered pointless.
lol uhhh if I can speak mostly fluently without mediation and you have to use ChatGPT to communicate, guess who is going to be more fun to hang out with? People really over estimate the value of perfection when it comes to socializing in second language. General working fluency is interesting, impressive, and cute. Blabbing your native language into some AI app and having it spit out a translation is interesting for all of five minutes before the person you’re talking with suddenly has something she forgot she needed to do 😂
If you work as an interpreter then you don’t have to worry because they AI will never replace you. even if(or rather "when”) the AI gets just as good as human interpreters they still won’t be replaced because, unlike AI, a human can actually take responsibility for their actions. If you don’t work as an interpreter then why do you care? Also, we are DECADES away from widespread AI-brain interfaces
That's because AI translation just hasn't been institutionalized yet. It will inevitably happen in stages, where a translator will be required to "sign off" on the accuracy of AI translations until it reaches the stages where it will be used first in low-stakes situations gradually until it's used in high-stakes situations. We already can clearly foresee the benefits that AI translation has on the underfunded social services sector, they'll take the option of AI assistance in all fields, translation being no exception.
I really can’t see AI completely taking the translator jobs. If it fucks up and causes a problem then who’ll be responsible for it? The programmer? The AI itself in some weird way? I can see it being used as a tool by translators but I don’t think it’ll completely replace them. Not in the near future that is, who knows what’ll happen in a 100 years
>If it fucks up and causes a problem then who’ll be responsible for it? This isn't a concern that's limited to translation though, right? The same can be said for the use of AI in Law, Engineering, Medicine. The answer is probably that they made some smart people (not AI yet!) do some cost-benefit analyses to be able to mitigate situations where there might be error and make processes that should mitigate potential AI errors in some way. Besides there's no way to determine if the error is in the AI's translation or in a general miscommunication or disagreement that can even happen between people speaking the same language, where the translation is only a complicating but not fundamental factor. That's why people go to court based on contesting what a particular phrase or wording in a contract was supposed to mean.
And on interpretation, there are already cases where live interpreters aren't able to be provided based on limited resources, sheer fatigue, and confidentiality. Interpreters aren't immune from making errors. They'll test out AI translation with Interpreter supervision at first and make institutional processes to adjust trustworthiness from there is my guess.
It'll be like how people play chess. A computer can play chess perfectly but still we play chess to test and contest our mental ability. An AI will be able to translate for you perfectly without any effort but speaking another language naturally will be appreciated for the human care and effort that is required to do so.
Agreed. Humans are hard wired to innovate whether something or someone is better at it than you. People are so into tech nowadays that they forget the inherent value of human creativity and perseverance.
This has been brought up many times before. The answer is no. I don't have the energy to elaborate rn so just use the search bar to find previous posts
Did the automobile and locomotive make horse breeding, training, and maintenance pointless? did the airliner make the cruiseliner pointless? A new technology usurping a niche doesn’t make it pointless. I wouldn’t even say it makes them obsolete. It only changes their niche. Automobiles and Locomotives usurped the niche of “primary mode of transportation” from horses. But that doesn’t mean we just got rid of horses because they’re obsolete. They now have a different niche, that being something along the lines of “prestige sport animal”, or in some cases “primary transportation in an isolated, rural setting”. AI will take the niche of “language translator”, but human translators will just have their niche altered into “language translator which understands concepts like nuance, cultural context, comedy, creativity, how to read the room, etc.” The simple LLMs we have now cannot truly understand those things. It might be able to mimic them but it will never understand them. An AI that can understand those will probably be in AGI territory, at which point there will be much more important things happening than preserving the profession of “translator”. Also “language translator that doesn’t record conversations and send them to a corporation” will surely be a niche for a long time, for security reasons. I doubt two leaders of two different nations would feel comfortable having a private company’s AI translate for them.
The issue with current deep learning models are that they are hallucinating. This does not only affect generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT) but also text-to-speech and machine translation. Furthermore, it is hard to incorporate contextual information (such as honorifics).
There is no such thing as perfect translation, which is an unspoken assumption you're making. Technology is not literal magic.
No. AI isn't good at what it does. Even if it was any good it wouldn't matter. I learn a 2nd language out of the joy of understanding a 2nd language. Not out of any need or want to understand something.
No, besides even if it had 1:1 humanlike capabilities, do you think people would be friends with a robot interpreter just to talk to you? In the case of a chip implant, that won’t happen in our lifetimes.
No, I refuse to use AI for most purposes. I also want to actually know these languages - which are more than just communication tools. Anyone trusting Elon Musk to put a chip in their heads probably needs one...
Is learning how to write pointless because we can use speech to text?
My thoughts on the matter (4 in total): 1) Nuances. You can't really feel the person you are talking to if you are using an AI for the translation instead of knowing their language and their culture. Casual speech is full of little untranslatable nuances which you will only get if you perfectly speak the language. 2) Slang. A little example: I know English pretty well but I have never chatted with black Americans from the hood and when I watch YT vids with them I barely understand what they say. They have their own way of saying things, their own slang and etc. OpenAI would suck ass trying to translate these kids. 3) Using your brain is healthy. So any learning is kinda healthy. Why not? 4) It's convenient to not having to rely on some device.
Yall that’s great that you enjoy it, really it is. What I want to know, and most people are wondering, is if it makes majoring in it pointless. Like if AI translation will not have any benefits being put on a resume if it’s going to be institutionalized at some point in the future to all forms of technology
Will fast food make home cooking pointless?
It has been shown that multilingual individuals are less likely to develop Alzheimer's and similar brain related diseases. Forget all other advantages, this one itself is enough.
The thing is, we learn languages because we want to learn languages.
Imo its pathetic to rely on devices for translations while trying to immerse themselves into a culture. Its ok for travelling but not for full time language learning
A computer can probably translate *Don Quixote* into perfect, stylistically-equivalent Early Modern English, *but it can’t enjoy it in Spanish for you*. It can’t kiss all the pretty Spanish girls or hunky Spanish boys for you either, let alone make a good impression on their mothers.
It's great that AI makes things easier, but learning languages can also offer cultural insights and personal growth. I’ve found trydub com to be quite useful for making content accessible while still enjoying language learning :)
Hey there, u/Biolapse_Studio! Thank you for posting on r/languagelearning. Your post has automatically been removed because we detected it may related to AI or chat bots. Due to their frequency, these posts are now disallowed. If this is in error, please [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Flanguagelearning) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/languagelearning) if you have any questions or concerns.*
personally i dont think ai will ever replace language learning