I was bit confused by that headline. Weirdly in Greenlandic and Finnish the word for democrats is written identically.
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The alien is asking whether he can pay with travelers checks. The Starfleet pilot respondss with âLimerick, Dublinâ
How silly
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Doing some browsing before i get back into work mode. I see an article on Polygon titled Bring back the 2000s-era sci-fi flopbuster, iâm amused at the word play. I switch browser tabs and iâm staring at Elsewhere Cafe. A single clear word floats into my mindâŚ
Flopulence (cue pretentious perfume commercial)
I chuckle at the absurdity of the word, and also make a note to myself to use it sometime soon.
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So I was looking at this post on my phone
and, as I usually do, I watched the video in an incognito tab so it doesnât fuck up my algorithm.
This time this Mark Rober video played completely dubbed into German, obviously by AI technology (although pretty convincingly, annoying cheerful YouTuber voice and all!).
I hate this sort of thing, so I went to turn it off in the video menu: there is absolutely no way to do so. YouTube apparently forces you to watch videos in your system language, at least when youâre not logged in! This is horrible.
I think one of the aspects of the âAI revolutionâ we havenât talked about a lot is that this will mean multilingualism in the worldâs youth will atrophy. The reason the Scandinavian countries were for a long time much better than the bigger European countries at speaking English was that their markets were too small for dubbing and for local productions to be worth it, so children grew up hearing (subtitled) English. This has changed with the streaming and YouTube revolutions, and levels of competency are levelling out across the continent. I fear that this sort of AI âassistiveâ technology will make us all into linguistic islands again.
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I was surprised by the video in Portuguese. For a moment I thought it was a cut from an episode of a Discovery Channel show.
I speak English poorly, without any fluency and with a vocabulary equivalent to that of a 5-year-old child. I confess that out of insecurity and laziness I even use an online translator.more than Id should. But I recognize that this hinders my ability to write properly.
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Yeah, this sort of thing doesnât solve your problem, if anything, it makes it worse. Obviously, they are working towards a future where we donât need to know another language. You would be writing this in Portuguese, and I in German, and if we met, we would have our phones as a universal real-time translator. It wouldnât even go via English anymore, there wouldnât be any âauthoritative versionâ of a forum like this, everyone would just write in whatever language, and every user would see a version in their own language.
But we have to ask ourselves if that is something we actually want. I enjoy learning and knowing different languages. It adds to brain plasticity. I really fear that once we donât have to express ourselves in foreign languages anymore, we just slip into a vegetative state. Especially, if all our other communication work (such as composing longer texts) is taken over by generative AI, which will also summarise anything thatâs too long or complicated to read.
Not to mention that no translation is ever perfect. Not even the best AI system can translate all the nuances of the original, because not even the best human translator can. Something is always lost in translation. Why would I want that when Iâm perfectly capable of watching the original?
Of course, what we want doesnât matter anymore. YouTube just dubs a video without the option of turning it off. We get what tech companies say we get. And they want this future.
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I googled to see whether others had the same problem (of course they do!) and this Reddit comment by /u/drArsMoriendi says it all:
I legitimately think that youtube as an american company doesnât understand multilingualism. Itâs kinda racist. I voted with my wallet and cancelled premium over its language settings, which feels insane to say
Iâve seen that with Google products a lot: they always assume thatâs every user speaks just one language and that they want everything in that language, without exception.
Shit on Microsoft all you want, at least they understand their users might work with different languages, and Windows and the office suite usually have no problem seamlessly switching between different keyboard layouts, autocorrect dictionaries and language settings. Itâs all just one press of alt & shift away.
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