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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

An interesting recent phenomena is that regular Chinese people have figured out how to use AI to speak for them to make english language youtube videos. They are quite fascinating to watch, because you don't normally get such an unfiltered perspective. I think people feel safe posting these because nobody knows them in the west, whereas family, friends and govt. see Chinese social media. And of course youtube is banned in China.. Some of them make a few hundred bucks from Alphabet, this is a big deal.

Here are a few (check out the comments- working class people from around the world make contact):

https://www.youtube.com/@kangkanginchina7

https://www.youtube.com/@Chineseruralareas

Anyway, I view this as one of the more positive uses for AI.

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Thank you for sharing these. I work with many Chinese people, but I am from a working class background. All the Chinese people I work with are of course the smartest and brightest and most fortunate, so it's difficult to get a sense for what working class Chinese people are like.

Ah, I think the origin of this video style is "Zaza in China"- or at least he's the most successful at it.

https://www.youtube.com/@zazainchina

He is also a vlogger in China making videos in English, but his don't use AI.

(Not about this particular channel)

I enjoy these videos a lot, esp. if they are about history and engineering. Some of videos have really good production quality. I guess they are probably translated fron original WeChat etc. source material.

Translation software and text-to-voice has existed for many years, why does AI make this any different?

Well I'm grouping these under AI- they have been around a while for sure, but maybe they have reached some kind of critical mass there: I'm imagining people on Chinese social media talking about it as a way to make money.

Also the text to speech is in their own voice. Some are using this as a way to help pronounce english (maybe there is some language training software available for this, I don't know).

AI is easier, faster, better, and deeply widespread

I was under the impression that AI was terrible for translating Asian languages (at least Chinese, Japanese and Korean) because it doesn't capture certain contextual nuances. Is it actually good now? Are there bilingual speakers who use it and vouch for it?

They likely use Chinese models which work much better in capturing those nuances.

Yes e.g. Qwen

It’s extremely good. Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Had multiple instances of confusion because the counterparty thought I was actually a native speaker because we had only communicated over text. Both commercial and social contexts. Translation is now effectively solved.

Edit: I should add like all LLM usage, you need to prompt well. I also like to run the translation back through DeepL for a more traditional technology read on it and to identify any obvious issues.

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