The same is happening to a lot of website owners. You lose half or more of your traffic to AI summaries trained on your own content. The cost of producing original content is the same as before.
It makes research harder too, since more and more public information is infected by AI content. Both published posts and internet discussions are tainted.
And then the AI companies threaten to crash the whole economy if we don't let them do it.
consp 56 minutes ago [-]
> You lose half or more of your traffic to AI summaries trained on your own content.
Wouldn't this be the reason for not calling it transformative but simple copyright theft?
fc417fc802 21 minutes ago [-]
For the millionth time, piracy isn't theft. It's copyright violation, not copyright theft.
No, a reduction in traffic is not sufficient to conclude that a copyright violation has occurred. Sure, it might have. Alternatively it might have produced a lossy summary in which case the reduction in traffic raises some difficult questions about the value of the original work.
In other cases an LLM can synthesize a genuinely useful explanation of a subject that is precisely tailored to the needs of the asker. In those cases the machine output might well prove more useful to the asker than any single original reference would have.
For something like news where what you're paying for is timely delivery it makes sense to restrict automated (not just LLM) access for the first few days because a similarly timely summary will capture the majority of the value proposition of your service.
That's not typical though. For example, I'm certainly not going to be satisfied with a summary of the plot of a book I'm interested in. Would you want to watch a 10 minute highlights reel in place of a 2 hour feature length film?
Saline9515 23 minutes ago [-]
Summarizing content is not copyright theft.
jillesvangurp 26 minutes ago [-]
AI translations are getting good. I've been working on our company website in the last month. It's a static website. So, I use Agentic coding tools to implement both coding and technical changes. A simple prompt "align the translations with the English version for all pages" and some guard rails in the form of skills and AGENTS.md instructions are doing most of the heavy lifting. To be clear.
These translations are not perfect, yet. But good enough for my needs. Any professional translator services would in any case be beyond our budget. The advantage of using agentic coding tools here (enabled by using a site generator rather than a CMS) is that I can get systematic about dealing with jargon, SEO, and frequently used phrases. I simply document all that and instruct the tool to refer to that. The funny thing is that most of the models are pretty good at fixing their own mistakes if you just ask them too. I asked it to look for examples of "denglish" (German English) in its own German translations and then to fix it. It found a few examples and the suggested fixes were fine.
A lot of people are focusing on the negative here. I like to look at the positive. We're approaching the moment where any person on this planet will be able to communicate directly with any other person on this planet without the need for translators. The tools already exist for this. But they need a lot of work on quality.
A second point here is that the role of English as the most popular intermediary language is disappearing as well. I'm not a native speaker. When I talk to foreigners from wherever, it's mostly in (bad) English. By definition that limits me to talking to people that have had enough education and exposure to English. This is very limiting. A lot of the people we need to talk to here in Germany aren't all that comfortable speaking English.
wartywhoa23 13 minutes ago [-]
> A lot of people are focusing on the negative here.
The negative: people are about to lose their jobs.
The positive: AI billionaires become trillionaires.
Why focus on the negative indeed!
ThrowawayTestr 9 minutes ago [-]
I think a real life tower of Babel is pretty cool. God destroyed it because he was afraid of a unified humanity.
rwmj 50 seconds ago [-]
Douglas Adam's prediction seems more aposite:
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
B1FIDO 5 minutes ago [-]
> God destroyed it
Where does it say that? I have never read any Book of Genesis that says "God destroyed the tower".
Also it doesn't say "God was afraid". God doesn't have negative emotions like that. God plans out everything, so He is not "afraid" in the human sense.
In fact, I am fairly certain that the mythical "Tower" for the Jews was sort of a parody of the Pyramids of Egypt and the Ziggurats of Babylon. They were essentially mocking their ancient neighbors in the Levant for such a frivolous project that they believed really didn't honor God, but increased their arrogance and hubris.
For Egypt, the pyramids were funerary monuments, i.e. they invariably honored some dead Pharaoh. The Jews invested their engineering progress in building a temple of the Living God instead.
So it stands to reason, in the Hebrews' account of the foreign projects, that immigrants would come in, mess up the project enough, and they would kinda abandon them in progress. But they weren't destroyed.
kubb 4 minutes ago [-]
But almost everyone speaks English as a second language, and most native English speakers don’t care enough to communicate with everyone.
pipo234 34 minutes ago [-]
Would like to point out that professional translation has been under pressure for much longer than AI.
I have friends that made a descent buck 20-30 years ago translating technical documents like car manuals. Over the years, prices fell from quarters per words to fractions of a cent.
And even though machine translation was barely existent, tools were used to argue higher productivity and therefore lower prices.
astrobe_ 1 hours ago [-]
> While using AI tools for everyday tasks like finding directions is “low-risk,” human translators will likely need to be involved for the foreseeable future in diplomatic, legal, financial and medical contexts where the risks are “humungous,” according to Benzo
Now it's a classic, you need an expert in order to check the work of the machine, because the "customer" is by definition not able to do it.
Aside from highly technical domain, in purely literary works, I think that the translator is a co-author - maybe IP laws acknowledges that already? I remember the translation of E.A. Poe by C. Baudelaire for instance; I think you could feel Baudelaire's style because it is a lot "warmer" than Poe's. I've also read a translation of a Japanese novel and I was quite disappointed with it. I don't know Japanese but I have read/watched quite a few mangas/animes, so I could sense the speech patterns behind the translations and sometimes thought they could have made better choices.
In any case, one will still need a translator who is good at "prompt engineering" to get a quality translation. I don't know. Maybe translators can add this skill to their CV, so they can propose quick-and-dirty/cheap translations, or no-AI high quality translations.
Some suggest "no-AI" labels on cultural products already - I think if it becomes a reality it will probably act as "quality signaling", because it is becoming more difficult every year to tell the difference between AI and human productions. It won't matter if what you read was written by an AI or a human (if it quacks and looks like a duck...), but what the customer will probably want is to avoid poorly-prompted machine translation.
fc417fc802 43 minutes ago [-]
> it will probably act as "quality signaling", because it is becoming more difficult every year to tell the difference
Note that this only applies to something like a translation where there's some notion of a "correct answer". For other cultural products it's irrelevant (as you say, if it quacks like a duck ...).
Quality signaling is really only necessary in situations where an upfront investment is required and any deception is only revealed sometime later upon use. Safety critical systems such as airbags are a model example of this - a counterfeit of deficient functionality won't be discovered until it deploys, which in most cases will never happen.
That said, while I certainly can't speak to business or diplomatic translations, when it comes to cultural works (ie entertainment) the appeal of machine translation to me has been gradually increasing over time as it gets better. I don't generally find localization desirable and in some cases it even leads to significant confusion when a change somehow munges important details or references. Confusion which I'm generally able to trivially resolve by referencing machine output.
vblanco 1 hours ago [-]
Commercial translator services lately are the worst they have ever been. You cant validate that they aren't directly sending your excel with the translation lines into a LLM with no tweaking/checking.
For a indie videogame i work on, we tried a couple translation agencies, and they gave terrible output. At the end, we built our own LLM based agentic translation, with lots of customization for our specific project like building a prompt based on where the menu/string is at, shared glossary, and other features. Testing this against the agencies, it was better because we could customize it for the needs of our specific game.
Even then, at the end of the day, we went with freelancers for some of the languages as we couldn't really validate the AI output on those languages.The freelancers took a month to do the translation vs the 2-3 days we ourselves took for the languages we knew and we could monitor the AI output. But they did a nice job, much better than the agencies.
I feel that what AI really completely kills is those translation services. Its not hard at all to build or customize your own AI system, so if the agency is going to charge you considerable money for AI output, just do it yourself and get a better result. Meanwhile those freelancers are still in demand as they can actually check the project and understand it for a nice translation, unlike the mechanical agencies where you send them the excel and they send it to who knows what or an AI without you being able to check.
I will likely be opensourcing this customizable AI translation system for my project soon.
vhhn 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone else worries that by contributing to open source software these days one is also digging his/her own grave?
Yoric 3 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I do, but it's not going to prevent me from doing so.
I believe that the current generation of GenAI (as a market, not necessarily as a tech) is going to crash and burn by 2027. I also believe that open-source will stay and will keep helping people and that, as the world becomes more lawless and free-for-all, we'll need all the help we can find.
jbreckmckye 1 hours ago [-]
Yes. It's one reason I've lost interest in OSS completely.
hwers 1 hours ago [-]
I’ve moved to more closed source projects for this reason (just for the fun of coding rather than sharing). Though I suspect they still use private github repos in their deals to microsoft
AlecSchueler 1 hours ago [-]
If you're not sharing the code then what's the benefit of GitHub over self hosted?
entuno 1 hours ago [-]
Not having to setup and maintain your own self hosted platform. And it also makes it easier to share with specific individuals if you want to.
yurishimo 1 hours ago [-]
Free backups
arcanemachiner 58 minutes ago [-]
At this point, just use Codeberg and send them a few bucks a month if you want to support them. Fuck GitHub.
wartywhoa23 53 minutes ago [-]
I've been collecting my downvotes calling that out ever since the advent of GitHub.
And I don't think most of those came from idealistic people without any vested interest in AI business.
pipo234 42 minutes ago [-]
It is a bit of a race to the bottom for library components: either you open source and it gets snatched by LLM parties or you keep it closed and good luck selling your wares.
On top of that the open source market will increasingly be flooded with (well intended) AI slop built by junior devs.
ginko 35 minutes ago [-]
I’m still convinced that training a model on GPL code makes the model itself a derivative and requires it to be released under GPL terms.
fithisux 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, but we can do Open Source in languages irrelevant to corporates for projects irrelevant to corporates.
The rest is closed source.
JamesAdir 2 hours ago [-]
You've moved to different country with a language that is vastly different from yours. Let's say you're an American moving into the Czech Republic. You need to sign an important document that has legal and business ramifications. Would you trust an AI translation on the document or ask for a professional to be in the loop?
BlackFly 1 hours ago [-]
For such a literal case, automatic translations generally suffice. The real translator touch comes about when their is some nuance to the language.
Was that a double entendre or not? If not, you might make a literal translation to get the meaning across. If so, then a literal translation will not get the message across. Vice versa, if it was not a double entendre but you translate it as one, you may confuse the message and if it was and you translate it as such, then the human connection can be maintained.
That is also the tricky bit where you cross from being proficient in the language (say B1-B2) to fluent (C1-C2), you start knowing these double meanings and nuance and can pick up on them. You can also pick up on them when they weren't intended and make a rejoinder (that may flop or land depending on your own skill).
If you are constantly translating with a machine, you won't really learn the language. You have to step away at some point. AI translations present that in full: a translated text with a removed voice; the voice of AI is all of us and that sounds like none of us.
krisoft 4 minutes ago [-]
> The real translator touch comes about when their is some nuance to the language.
And as we all know legal language is famous for having no nuance whatsoever, there are no opaque technical terms with hundreds of years of history behind their usage, there is no difference between the legal systems of different countries, and there is no possible difference in case law or the practicalities of legal enforcement. /sarcasm
What is clear to me that in a situation like this neither AI translation nor human translation is sufficient. What the imagined American signing an important legal document in the Czech Republic needs is a lawyer practicing in the Czech Republic who speaks a language the imagined American also speaks.
lazide 59 seconds ago [-]
The first part is absolutely not true.
As someone who has been in that situation before, ‘literal’ translation is not actually a thing. Words and phrases have different meanings between legal systems.
You need a certified translation from someone who is familiar with both legal systems or you’re going to have a very bad time.
Which I think you know from the second part of your statement.
Legal documents likely have much more impact than a random chat with a stranger.
mickeyp 2 hours ago [-]
Is the professional _just_ a translator, or an expert in translation _and_ the domain? The latter is preferable; for the former? I'd trust Gemini or Claude.
marginalia_nu 1 hours ago [-]
It's probably advisable to have a lawyer eye through such a document even if that document is in English if there is the slightest question about what it says.
Pacta sunt servanda can be a real bitch sometimes.
AlecSchueler 1 hours ago [-]
I know many people who until last year would have just signed and hoped for the best. Most people can't afford professional translation services.
nicbou 1 hours ago [-]
These translations usually need to be certified, at least in Germany.
block_dagger 1 hours ago [-]
I’d query the top 3 frontier models.
csomar 41 minutes ago [-]
You need a real professional for this and not just a translator (the translator can just as well run your document through an LLM and just send you the result). You preferably need a professional who has skin in the game (ie: approved by court).
anovikov 1 hours ago [-]
I will totally just do google translate with a phone's cam and that will be it.
bdytrgr 33 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 10:38:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It makes research harder too, since more and more public information is infected by AI content. Both published posts and internet discussions are tainted.
And then the AI companies threaten to crash the whole economy if we don't let them do it.
Wouldn't this be the reason for not calling it transformative but simple copyright theft?
No, a reduction in traffic is not sufficient to conclude that a copyright violation has occurred. Sure, it might have. Alternatively it might have produced a lossy summary in which case the reduction in traffic raises some difficult questions about the value of the original work.
In other cases an LLM can synthesize a genuinely useful explanation of a subject that is precisely tailored to the needs of the asker. In those cases the machine output might well prove more useful to the asker than any single original reference would have.
For something like news where what you're paying for is timely delivery it makes sense to restrict automated (not just LLM) access for the first few days because a similarly timely summary will capture the majority of the value proposition of your service.
That's not typical though. For example, I'm certainly not going to be satisfied with a summary of the plot of a book I'm interested in. Would you want to watch a 10 minute highlights reel in place of a 2 hour feature length film?
These translations are not perfect, yet. But good enough for my needs. Any professional translator services would in any case be beyond our budget. The advantage of using agentic coding tools here (enabled by using a site generator rather than a CMS) is that I can get systematic about dealing with jargon, SEO, and frequently used phrases. I simply document all that and instruct the tool to refer to that. The funny thing is that most of the models are pretty good at fixing their own mistakes if you just ask them too. I asked it to look for examples of "denglish" (German English) in its own German translations and then to fix it. It found a few examples and the suggested fixes were fine.
A lot of people are focusing on the negative here. I like to look at the positive. We're approaching the moment where any person on this planet will be able to communicate directly with any other person on this planet without the need for translators. The tools already exist for this. But they need a lot of work on quality.
A second point here is that the role of English as the most popular intermediary language is disappearing as well. I'm not a native speaker. When I talk to foreigners from wherever, it's mostly in (bad) English. By definition that limits me to talking to people that have had enough education and exposure to English. This is very limiting. A lot of the people we need to talk to here in Germany aren't all that comfortable speaking English.
The negative: people are about to lose their jobs.
The positive: AI billionaires become trillionaires.
Why focus on the negative indeed!
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Where does it say that? I have never read any Book of Genesis that says "God destroyed the tower".
Also it doesn't say "God was afraid". God doesn't have negative emotions like that. God plans out everything, so He is not "afraid" in the human sense.
In fact, I am fairly certain that the mythical "Tower" for the Jews was sort of a parody of the Pyramids of Egypt and the Ziggurats of Babylon. They were essentially mocking their ancient neighbors in the Levant for such a frivolous project that they believed really didn't honor God, but increased their arrogance and hubris.
For Egypt, the pyramids were funerary monuments, i.e. they invariably honored some dead Pharaoh. The Jews invested their engineering progress in building a temple of the Living God instead.
So it stands to reason, in the Hebrews' account of the foreign projects, that immigrants would come in, mess up the project enough, and they would kinda abandon them in progress. But they weren't destroyed.
I have friends that made a descent buck 20-30 years ago translating technical documents like car manuals. Over the years, prices fell from quarters per words to fractions of a cent.
And even though machine translation was barely existent, tools were used to argue higher productivity and therefore lower prices.
Now it's a classic, you need an expert in order to check the work of the machine, because the "customer" is by definition not able to do it.
Aside from highly technical domain, in purely literary works, I think that the translator is a co-author - maybe IP laws acknowledges that already? I remember the translation of E.A. Poe by C. Baudelaire for instance; I think you could feel Baudelaire's style because it is a lot "warmer" than Poe's. I've also read a translation of a Japanese novel and I was quite disappointed with it. I don't know Japanese but I have read/watched quite a few mangas/animes, so I could sense the speech patterns behind the translations and sometimes thought they could have made better choices.
In any case, one will still need a translator who is good at "prompt engineering" to get a quality translation. I don't know. Maybe translators can add this skill to their CV, so they can propose quick-and-dirty/cheap translations, or no-AI high quality translations.
Some suggest "no-AI" labels on cultural products already - I think if it becomes a reality it will probably act as "quality signaling", because it is becoming more difficult every year to tell the difference between AI and human productions. It won't matter if what you read was written by an AI or a human (if it quacks and looks like a duck...), but what the customer will probably want is to avoid poorly-prompted machine translation.
Note that this only applies to something like a translation where there's some notion of a "correct answer". For other cultural products it's irrelevant (as you say, if it quacks like a duck ...).
Quality signaling is really only necessary in situations where an upfront investment is required and any deception is only revealed sometime later upon use. Safety critical systems such as airbags are a model example of this - a counterfeit of deficient functionality won't be discovered until it deploys, which in most cases will never happen.
That said, while I certainly can't speak to business or diplomatic translations, when it comes to cultural works (ie entertainment) the appeal of machine translation to me has been gradually increasing over time as it gets better. I don't generally find localization desirable and in some cases it even leads to significant confusion when a change somehow munges important details or references. Confusion which I'm generally able to trivially resolve by referencing machine output.
For a indie videogame i work on, we tried a couple translation agencies, and they gave terrible output. At the end, we built our own LLM based agentic translation, with lots of customization for our specific project like building a prompt based on where the menu/string is at, shared glossary, and other features. Testing this against the agencies, it was better because we could customize it for the needs of our specific game.
Even then, at the end of the day, we went with freelancers for some of the languages as we couldn't really validate the AI output on those languages.The freelancers took a month to do the translation vs the 2-3 days we ourselves took for the languages we knew and we could monitor the AI output. But they did a nice job, much better than the agencies.
I feel that what AI really completely kills is those translation services. Its not hard at all to build or customize your own AI system, so if the agency is going to charge you considerable money for AI output, just do it yourself and get a better result. Meanwhile those freelancers are still in demand as they can actually check the project and understand it for a nice translation, unlike the mechanical agencies where you send them the excel and they send it to who knows what or an AI without you being able to check.
I will likely be opensourcing this customizable AI translation system for my project soon.
I believe that the current generation of GenAI (as a market, not necessarily as a tech) is going to crash and burn by 2027. I also believe that open-source will stay and will keep helping people and that, as the world becomes more lawless and free-for-all, we'll need all the help we can find.
And I don't think most of those came from idealistic people without any vested interest in AI business.
On top of that the open source market will increasingly be flooded with (well intended) AI slop built by junior devs.
The rest is closed source.
Was that a double entendre or not? If not, you might make a literal translation to get the meaning across. If so, then a literal translation will not get the message across. Vice versa, if it was not a double entendre but you translate it as one, you may confuse the message and if it was and you translate it as such, then the human connection can be maintained.
That is also the tricky bit where you cross from being proficient in the language (say B1-B2) to fluent (C1-C2), you start knowing these double meanings and nuance and can pick up on them. You can also pick up on them when they weren't intended and make a rejoinder (that may flop or land depending on your own skill).
If you are constantly translating with a machine, you won't really learn the language. You have to step away at some point. AI translations present that in full: a translated text with a removed voice; the voice of AI is all of us and that sounds like none of us.
And as we all know legal language is famous for having no nuance whatsoever, there are no opaque technical terms with hundreds of years of history behind their usage, there is no difference between the legal systems of different countries, and there is no possible difference in case law or the practicalities of legal enforcement. /sarcasm
What is clear to me that in a situation like this neither AI translation nor human translation is sufficient. What the imagined American signing an important legal document in the Czech Republic needs is a lawyer practicing in the Czech Republic who speaks a language the imagined American also speaks.
As someone who has been in that situation before, ‘literal’ translation is not actually a thing. Words and phrases have different meanings between legal systems.
You need a certified translation from someone who is familiar with both legal systems or you’re going to have a very bad time.
Which I think you know from the second part of your statement.
Legal documents likely have much more impact than a random chat with a stranger.
Pacta sunt servanda can be a real bitch sometimes.