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FabHK

Some of these tortured phrases are great. My favourites:

"flag to clamor" for signal to noise

"individual computerized collaborator" for PDA (personal digital assistant)

"haze figuring" for cloud computing

"information stockroom" for data warehouse

"focal preparing unit" for CPU

"discourse acknowledgement" for voice recognition

"mean square blunder" for MSE (mean square error)

"arbitrary right of passage" for random access

"arbitrary timberland" for random forest

"irregular esteem" for random value

ETA:

"notoriety examination" for sentiment analysis

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I enjoyed finding "counterfeit consciousness" for artificial intelligence. To me it evokes a kind of science fiction that's shown up occasionally on HN[1].

[1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Also “haze figuring” for cloud computing.

It sounds like something you'd find in 30s, 40s, 50s sci-fi for sure! Like “visiplate” (E.E. “Doc” Smith, Heinlein) for a computer display screen. (Along with ticker tape printouts and tape reels in the far future of course.)

Makes me want to put smog-hosting in my CV.

The smog is just the Chinese cloud.

Ah, vapordecisionware. But that might be confused with regular management.

Really highlights that the actual phrases don't make any more sense than the tortured versions, other than the fact that we've been hearing all of them for years so they now sound normal

Puts me in mind of Pratchett's parody of 'fuzzy logic', "Woolly Thinking".

I'll certainly be watching this debacle play out with a hot fresh bag of Banged Grains!

I happen to be reading Dune today, and AI is referred to as counterfeiting the human mind

I searched github for "counterfeit consciousness" and stumbled into quite the rabbit hole https://github.com/search?q=counterfeit+consciousness

Holy cow!

I see nothing today?

Reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

Reminds me of a Google translation of "bass" to Chinese as "low frequency fish"

Reading this list, it almost seems like these were created by looking up each individual word in a thesaurus, which of course destroys much of the meaning.

E.g.,

  Signal -> flag
  To -> to
  Noise -> clamor

…and…

  Data -> information
  Warehouse -> stockroom

This would be a lot easier than running through multiple translation steps (as proposed elsewhere here).

This exact process has been used by spammers for a long time now. It's called spinning, and it is basically the kind of thesaurus replacement you're describing here. When I read the OP, my impression was that these authors were running plagiarized portions of their articles through a similar kind of spinner.

NB: The paper itself describing this problem talks about the use of spinbot.com at the end.

spinbot Tortured Phrases -> "tormented expressions"

If I was in a situation where I had to write on occupational health and safety in forestry I would shamelessly appropriate "mean square blunder" and "arbitrary timberland", those are superbly above the mean square!

These sounded Chinese to me so threw this comment into Google Translate to figure what typical forward translations are and reverse translation of tortured versions will be. Bingo. Those are clearly translated from Chinese. Not sure if those are some form of plagiarisms as clamored or just a bad translation software prevalent in Chinese research communities though.

From top to bottom: 信噪比, 個人數字助理, 雲計算, 數據倉庫, 中央處理單元, 語音識別, MSE（均方誤差）, 隨機訪問, 隨機森林, 隨機值, 情感分析

Deep-fried versions: “旗幟到喧囂”, “個人計算機化合作者”, “霧霾計算”, “信息庫”, “焦點準備單元”, “話語確認”, “均方錯誤”, “任意通行權”, “任意林地”, “不規則尊重”, “惡名考試”

This is not a machine translation issue. The deep fried versions in Chinese make about as little sense as it does in English. Again, this is caused by word-by-word theasurus-running most likely in English.

Thanks for pulling those out. I enjoyed them. It does remind me that even before AI we had this kind of tortured phrases just in product descriptions of, for example, Chinese products. Like as a child I had been given a clone Rubik's cube labelled the Turrible Tetrahedron.

There might be a common concept between this, chaff[1] and Steven Pinker's Euphemism Treadmill.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure)

It's funny when it's done for laughs: https://www.instagram.com/nathanwpylestrangeplanet/?hl=en

Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4

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