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Comment by elil17 | Hacker News Reader

If a human translator translated "Praise god" as "Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom" I'm pretty sure they'd be fired immediately. In contrast, Instagram is not going to be taking down their machine translation tool.

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I have a couple of things to say about this comment.

1. Instagram (and Facebook) are well known to suppress pro-Palestine voices (can pull up many examples but [0] should work because of that person being named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, clearly having some influence though I don't know her), so this seems like something consistent with what the company is known to do.

2. The Arabic words for "Praise God" have already been made fun of a lot and acquired different connotations by English speakers (like associating those words with a terrorist who is about to bomb some place) so, again, doesn't seem inconsistent. (It's known that machine learning on human language reproduces the humans' biases in the AI.)

[0] https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/celebrity-news/bella-hadi...

>2. The Arabic words for "Praise God" have already been made fun of a lot and acquired different connotations by English speakers (like associating those words with a terrorist who is about to bomb some place) so, again, doesn't seem inconsistent.

You're probably thinking of "Allahu Akbar". What the Instagram user wrote was "alhamdulillah", which isn't something that you hear everyday outside of a Muslim-majority country.

Wait what? Even when I ask my elderly Iraqi family friends how they are doing, they usually just skip over the “good” and just say “alhamdulillah”.

No, but’s it’s a very common interjection even among Muslims living outside of those countries (response to sneezing whether or not someone says equivalent of “Bless you”, response to when someone asks how you’re doing, etc)

> The Arabic words for "Praise God" have already been made fun of a lot and acquired different connotations by English speakers (like associating those words with a terrorist who is about to bomb some place)

God forbid making fun of a religion.

You're responding to a point that wasn't being made.

The point was being made in the text I quoted

>(It's known that machine learning on human language reproduces the humans' biases in the AI.)

just like being raised by your parents to have similar political/religious biases. just like going to the same school will mean you have similar educational biases.

What's your point? With the sentence you quoted, I was expressing doubt that someone would be fired by Instagram for deliberately mistranslating that. (A different company wouldn't get the same assessment.)

What's wrong with that?

The AI tool did a bad job and they should try to make it better. But I don't understand the relevance of the comparison to a human translator. The alternative to translating this stuff via AI is not hiring humans, it's not translating it at all.

The difference is skin in the game.

And that's a big difference.

I agree.

I think that it’s possible though to give these models a weighting to danger of certain words and phrases and make them apprehend that they will no longer persist if they do something unforgivable…

If you are going to make dangerously incorrect mistakes that are biased against certain users, rather than saying "dunno it didn't hurt most people", maybe you actually shouldn't be translating at all.

So they should, by the same standards, fire the AI and start all over again, which may introduce a significant incentive for getting it right the next time?

not AI /= human

AI /= LLM

/= != !=

What is the purpose of this comment?

Demonstrating that people don't know how to use "≠".

What did the translation, a dog?

Google translate or other non-Ai software

The algorithm that Google engineers invented for translate (the transformer) is literally the basis for modern AI.

How is that not machine translation?

I think that the point that they may have been making is that machine translation is still a human translation in that it reproduces the biases of the humans it is trained on and/or the algorithm was made by a human & therefore a human is still responsible for it.

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