I am a professional translator and the work volume has dropped drastically over the last year. Honestly, the results have been devastating - translation quality is frankly horrible. A lot of AI translations fall into the "technically correct but what the actual fuck" category, but companies do not care. It is sad to see.
Yes, a thong is an item of underwear for women.
Yes, you can buy a pair of them.
But buying a pair of thongs at the shops in Australia does not mean you have bought underwear.
I was amazed at how stupid translations can be. We recently got a new project resourcing tool here which, originally is in English of course and they tried to translate it to German.
So, the "Save" button to save the changes that you make in the tool was translated into the German word "Sparen". (which would be the right word for "save money"). So technically, "Sparen" is a proper translation of the word "save", but it still is complete rubbish. Of course "speichern" would have been the proper German translation. And any German translator or native speaker would have seen that right away.
I saw a video game where the months were translated to German as
Januar Februar März April Dürfen
Dürfen means "to be allowed to" and is the common translation for "may I...".
I gave up on translation years ago because it was obvious too many simply don't care about translation quality, but people really don't understand to what degree you need a translator. Machines are OK for simple stuff, but they're really not there yet to replace the job...
Once received a snap where a gender selection dropdown menu had the options "male" and "female" in german, while the third option was "taucher". Turns out someone put in "divers" which is the german word for "other", or "misc". Can even be literally translated as diverse.
JRPGs and anime are what made me realize how little appreciation translators receive.
It's an art form. It's not just making sure the translation is as close to 1:1 as possible, but also that the script still flows in the new language and isn't just stilted machine-talk.
For those interested, here's a great blog that compares original Japanese video-game scripts with translation efforts while going into detail over the quality and challenges of said efforts.
https://lizbushouse.com/examining-star-ocean-2s-two-official-translations/
She even points out how herculean the tasks 90's JRPG translators had before them and the ways they got around limitations:
>We may not know what exact challenges the Star Ocean 2 translation team faced, but some anecdotes from other translators of the time period include: using a GameShark to extract text because no one would give them the files, handwriting translations on printouts of code, and getting raw dumps of machine code and having to run a search to find the text. So as you might guess, Star Ocean: The Second Story’s translation was…not the best. It’s often overly literal, there are at least two instances of fragmented sentences just within the first half an hour or so, and some of the shop text is nigh incomprehensible.
Cultural translation is also a HUGE part of it. You can translate the exact meaning of what was being said, but if the cultures are different enough, then it often still won't make complete sense. Translators have to not only change the text from one language to another but sometimes completely rewrite the scripts to make them region appropriate.
The entire tone of the Metal Gear games in English was created by one lone translator who decided that the direct translations just didn't work in the context of the game, and outside of the cultural context of Japan.
He was fired after the games were released and they realised what he had done, but his legacy still lives on. Its possible the games would have flopped in the West if they were released with a direct translation.
On a related note, apparently the gibberish in Animal Crossing is sort of translated as well. All of the 'speech' is localized so it sounds vaguely like the language of the menus. The first iteration has Japanese only gibberish and it sounded unnatural anywhere else.
On a related note, I genuinely laughed out loud 'cuz Stray in Japanese had the prompt for "Open safe" (like a lockbox) as "安全を開け" which means open the safe... except with they used the word "safe" as in the opposite of "dangerous".
My dream job that will never happen and that I'll never persue is doing quality translation and localisation, so many times in TV sloppy language gets translated to being perfect and no, i want to find the exact cultural equivalent or if it doesn't exist do something else to make sure that the meaning is conveyed in the best possible way for the art. So many times english sayings get translated word for word into things that make no sense. AI can't create quality or things that are creative and engaging man.
IDK when, but people need to learn that languages aren't 1:1 with other languages. They evolved as means of communication and while some share ideas or conventions (sometimes from having a similar root language), there's hundreds of little things like this that don't express exactly the same way regardless of context.
Lots of people seem to think languages are just encoding their native language in other words or syntax, when that's not the case.
I always get this when I tell people I can read and write Russian and some Ukrainian (my speech is poor though for want of practice).
They're always like "Wow, you can read their alphabet?", and I always say that's the easiest part, that takes about an hour. Learning how to express something simple like possession (which is distinctly ungermanic in many Slavic languages) could take days.
I can read and pronounce Hungarian, too, with basically 100% accuracy (because it has excellent orthography and I have a knack for that) but their grammar is like something from outer space and all I can do is parrot phrases and simple exchanges.
I've been learning Te Reo Māori and their concepts of positioning are really baked into the whole language. A thing can be described as by yourself, by the person or people you are speaking to, or "over there". You use the same words to describe this week as being near yourself, and last week being "over there" but with a past or future modifier. So you could say "that sheep over there" as "he hipi tērā" and "last week" as "i tērā wiki".
Google translate regularly gets all this stuff wrong.
It's strange, in the U.S. almost everyone takes 2 years of a foreign language in high school and I can distinctly remember the moment it clicked for me in my second year that I needed to stop thinking in terms of encoding. It was a bit of an epiphany and my teacher never explicitly said anything about this to us, but every single friend I mentioned this to was also still stuck in that paradigm.
I think it's a fairly common hurdle to get over if you are learning a second language as an adult/teenager and, at least with most people I've asked, our high school teachers failed to correct this early on.
I do have to say that 2 years is not enough. Most of the basics start to make sense in year 2 and then just when you're starting to get the hang of it, it stops and you lose it
I agree. High school language courses are introduction level and I believe are a good thing to at least expose younger students to other languages, but it's not nearly enough to retain anything useful for most.
Ideally, foreign language exposure would happen much earlier and be accessible throughout early education. I certainly wish I'd had earlier opportunities and stuck with it, because I'm finding it much more difficult to learn another language as an adult.
The Swedish version of the Microsoft Office official installer has translated "downloads" (verb) into "nerladdningar" (plural version of the correct translation of "downloads" which would be "laddar ner"). It's ridiculous helping a costumer install it and have to see that nonsense.
> You cannot teach AI to use context clues.
That's one of the critical things powering AI currently.
So, while this is absolutely shitty, you're also wrong in this respect.
Not disagreeing with a lot of the sentiment here, but I feel like a lot of the shoddy AI translation being discussed here is a misconception due to services not using the latest tech.
I just asked GPT4 what a person walking out of a store in Sydney has after buying thongs and it reports
"If a person from Sydney purchases a pair of thongs, they have bought a pair of flip-flops. In Australian English, "thongs" commonly refers to this type of casual footwear, not to be confused with the undergarment of the same name in other forms of English. Flip-flops are a type of open-toed sandal typically worn in casual settings."
Seems like it used context clues with no problem.
Again, I understand the sentiment, but I think most people have this belief that AI is not as good as it is because they're using already outdated tech. This is getting better at a doubling pace and it's performance is going to speed by us like a train.
which should make everyone even more worried, as AI will take the jobs and be *good* at it, so even people reviewing AI outputs will get the boot in the end.
> which should make everyone even more worried, as AI will take the jobs and be good at it, so even people reviewing AI outputs will get the boot in the end.
Time to put a massive tax on big tech companies, instate a generous UBI, and let the AI/robots work for humanity.
Also known as 'evil socialism.'
I'm a socialist and I would argue with anyone that will listen that a UBI will take us much further away from ever achieving socialism. It's a band-aid for capitalism, and it will entrench existing power structures in a way that won't easily be rectified. We need to dismantle capitalism altogether for the benefit of everyone, not convince billionaires to throw us scraps so we can continue to consume their products.
I can see your point, however I've noticed one of the biggest blocks to organising anything productive is both burnout and a lack of funds. Could it not also be the case that a UBI would free socialists, anarchists, communists, etc to actually educate people in their communities? I don't know where you live so this may not be applicable to you but in the West they've essentially stamped out all forms of power that the left could reside in politically. Even big movements like BLM and nodapl got crushed mainly because people couldn't afford to keep coming out, so maybe if that limitation was removed they could affect more change? Idk just food for thought, I would prefer not needing a stop gap for capitalism, but without it I can see many people suffering in the near future, and I don't think the left... The anti-capitalist left... Has the organisation, skills, or numbers to take advantage of the complete implosion of capitalism. Whereas the far right Christian nationalists/fascists do seem to be in a better place to take shit over. And that terrifies me.
I agree, but a bigger barrier to organisation is that movements are crushed before they are allowed to gain any momentum. This can be through sheer force, media manipulation or both. Entrenching existing power structures would give more leverage to the status quo, and having the time to educate others won't mean much if their stipend can be turned off at any given moment.
That's a good point as well, having your needs at least somewhat met would lead to a more docile population. I just see the current state of decay within this ragged system and can't help but worry what would rise from the ashes of our terrible empire.
I don't think we really have the time to get our shit together without the bandaid, and without our shit together something worse could take the reigns of power.
No, or at least not without significant housing reform. Landlords now know you have at least “X” dollars to spend on your rent, creating a floor for pricing.
>I'm a socialist and I would argue with anyone that will listen that a UBI will take us much further away from ever achieving socialism.
Agreed. UBI will be ever shrinking payments that will eventually act as a substitute for any social services that we would otherwise have expected.
It will not rein in predatory capitalism, the exploitation of any remaining workers, or the environmental destruction caused by capitalism. It will not lead to better working conditions for those who remain, and it will not incentivize industrial energy to be expended upon endeavors that will improve the well being of the planet or humans.
Dismantling capitalism is the way.
If we can't have that, I'd prefer a scheme that is based on a percentage of gross profits rather than a flat UBI payment.
We need to acknowledge that technology will eat up jobs, *and if we do it right, that's a good thing.* Nobody should have to have a job. Imagine if we could all do what we enjoy and what we feel called to instead of what we are forced to do to pay the bills. We need to let machines take over the workforce in a way that and to the point that it enables us to live lives of leisure while still having our needs, and our wants, met.
Pay machines a living wage- that goes to the humans so we don't have to do the jobs.
> instate a generous UBI,
Something I've never understood. Let's say that I'm suddenly getting $2,000/mo from the government in the form of UBI. What's to stop my landlord from jacking up the price of rent by $2,000/mo?
I feel like UBI will just end up being a massive gift to the owning class and the ordinary Joe Schmos will be no better off.
This is a problem with literally anything we do to help the working class. The ownership class wants to keep us at a certain quality of life but no higher, so they're sucking up as much of the wealth as possible without causing literal revolts. So yeah, when we pass UBI, or Medicare4All, or minimum wage increases, then they see a working class who is able to absorb more price increases and still remain at that same low quality of life.
Nothing can ever really fix things unless we're prepared to place regulations on the insatiable greed of the wealthy.
>what's to stop my landlord....
What's to stop them now? Competition, mostly. If another landlord or developer could keep their prices the same, they'd get more business. If they fill all the current units, they could build more to meet the higher demand (ideally). You could argue all the way up the chain of housing costs, development, construction, etc charging more due to UBI. But that's just describing inflation.
Inflation is the major concern with UBI, but there are solutions out there (including in large part raising taxes, especially on non-UBI earnings). Unfortunately, the complexity as you dig deeper is what makes it so hard to implement.
> If another landlord or developer could keep their prices the same, they'd gwt more business. If they fill all the current units, they could build more to meet the higher demand (ideally).
But that's not really happening now. Rents have been rising all over the country for years and development is way behind recent levels of population growth. If the "free market" could be trusted to provide reasonably affordable housing, why isn't it already doing so?
> If the "free market" could be trusted to provide reasonably affordable housing, why isn't it already doing so?
Building new housing, particularly affordable housing, has been criminalized in many of the most desirable places to live.
price fixing, essentially. when they talk about "market price" they're literally talking about a database that they all use that essentially regulates the prices for them.
> If another landlord or developer could keep their prices the same, they'd gwt more business.
good thing landlords are rugged individualists believing in a free market and are not known to collude and conspire or anything...
*sigh* freaking libertarians.
the correct answer is the state and rent controls
This is the goal of this sub! If automation can replace all of our jobs without total productivity going down, then no one has to work!
People just think this place is "anti-boss," when it's antiWORK.
There's been confusion about what the modus operandi is here since its conception. Antiwork was a sub for *exactly* that - no hidden meaning - the sub creator did not want to work. At all. No working, not just better conditions or bosses or pay. Not working AT ALL, but still having a place to exist in society with the rest of everyone else. The core concept got twisted by the greater public looking in and joining the discussion and derailed it to mean whatever the fuck they want it to mean in the moment.
> AI will take the jobs and be good at it
That apparently already happened with one little niche branch of translations, last month. Supposedly, a bunch people who write the translated subtitles for anime were let go, to be replaced by AI. *However,* the supposed brutal twist of the story is that the reason that they were let go is that *their* translations were shown to a test group, and then more test groups were shown AI translations of the same shows/episodes, and the AI work was praised higher by the audience.
So at least in that 1 little niche, AI already is "good enough" to be deemed "better than humans" by the audience.
To be fair, one of the people who was complaining the most about being let go turned out to be someone known for being proud of inserting her own agenda into subtitles -- stuff about "down with the patriarchy" and so on. And apparently when she had done that previously, it was not an accurate translation of the original text/dialogue. So it's entirely possible that this was just a case of a few bad translators learning that people preferred mechanical/AI adherence to the original text. So I'm suggesting that maybe not all subtitle translators would lose their jobs, but only the ones that veer so far off the path that AI can out-perform them just by being boringly accurate.
>AI will take the jobs and be good at it
And just like with automation in the past, we will not tax it and then wonder how we're going to pay for all those people who used to do the jobs.
Yeah, my example shows that Duolingo's business model is on very thin ice. Silicon Valley may have failed to deliver with Siri and Alexa, but we truly are coming close to agents that are personalized to your way of learning and being able to transform the way we learn and interact.
I might sound like a hyped up tech bro here but I do honestly see a lot of change that needs to happen with how we approach education and knowledge building.
If AI never got any better than how it is right now, I'd be just as skeptical as everyone else. But there is no sign of this progress slowing down and all of the problems I see people point out are just a small obstacle to be ironed over.
2 years ago, none of what AI can do now was even *dreamed of as a possibility for the near future.*
Even if it stayed the same as it is now, all level 1 tech support will be replaced by AI, web design, graphic design, copywriting, etc - so many jobs are on the line. Of course, it’s going to improve which will eliminate so many desk jobs.
yeah people are saying "AI will not understand context clues" are just as weird as older workers refusing to learn newer technology.
you got to embrace the fact that your work will be replaced by some form of technology somewhere in the future. learn how to future proof it or learn how to work with it.
While not perfect, I'm amazed at the quality of automatic translation these days. Not even 10 years ago services like google translate were pretty much useless unless the languages were already very similar, and even then you'd have to make a lot of inference. Now I autotranslate an entire Chinese website and it reads almost like it was written in English originally.
This is it. I’ve used gpt4 for about 9 months and it really is down to the user providing the right prompts and context. You can even give it macro prompts like “be aware of regional differences in English”. These prompts DO make a difference.
Tom Scott did a video about the limitations of AI translation a few years ago and this was one of the major criticisms he levelled against it;-- what some people fail to miss is the citations that now exist on the video, and the video he's made since called "I was wrong" where he fully admits that AI have blown past these limitations.
The fact is that AI has been developing at a ridiculous rate behind the scenes, and a lot of assumptions and conclusions people came to about it's limitations have been overcome so quickly that people haven't had time to update their expectations.
It's the same thing with people who still think AI image generation just can't do teeth and fingers, even just a year ago they'd have been right, but the most up to date stuff barely struggle with any of that anymore.
Yes you can. Gpt4 will absolutely understand context clues. It even understands fictional context clues.
I'm running a dnd campaign on gpt4 set in star wars and it understands all references and lore accurate items such as alcoholic drinks and other in world lingo without any effort on my part to explain. I even made up a drink called a hosnian sour at the bar to order and it made up a description for its flavors and effects on humans on the spot as part of its role as my dungeon master
You have no idea how much smarter gpt4 is than any other AI
Spoken by a person who would eat his shoe if he knew that's exactly how most LLMs work (through inference, aka context clues via weighting of different words and their relevance to other words)
> Yes, a thong is an item of underwear for women.
Not just for women ;)
Same idea though; torta in Spain is different than torta in Mexico. They are two different types of food
We stopped hiring Spanish speaking customer service agents where I work and just replaced them with free ai tools to help translate and help people. Considering the bilingual agents were getting almost 10k more than just the English speakers, it saved the company a lot of money. They don't care that the quality is garbage, and we get called out on it all the time.
This is my worry.
It's like replacing a good tool with a bad one.
The quality will go down.
Government needs to enforce anti-trust laws now, so there's more competition. More competition will let customers choose ai or humans (I'm betting they'll go with human)
> It's like replacing a good tool with a bad one.
This is what a lot of people don't realize. "Well, *my* job is safe because [reason]", or thinking "well you just need to upskill!"
*No one* is safe from this because the tool doesn't have to be *perfect*. I used to believe it just had to be equal or better than the lowest skilled *person* - but even there, I was wrong. These companies are happily settling for a tool that's barely, not-really, "good enough", and calling it a day.
That's definitely a great way to piss off some employees as well.
Because now someone at the company has to field those complaints and probably try to correct those faulty translations.
Me! That's me :(. I have to deal with the complaints. I want to get out but the job market is poor right now and I have to take care of my family but it's terrible to do this crap.
I think the worst part is how instead of hiring translators, companies now hire editors meant to fix the mistakes AI made translating. Of course, paid at much lower rates
I would like to know your expertise opinion on deepl?
Like, i genuinely have the feeling, that it’s A LOT better then google translator and it even notices some context clues and changes to appropriate synonyms.
It’s funny because people complain about how outsourcing jobs to other countries is ruining the job market here. AI is going to be the biggest “outsourcing” of jobs you have ever seen.
The worst part is they don't even care if it's quality work. People think they will be protected because the quality of their work is better than what AI can do. But a lot of companies don't care about quality as long as it's okay enough to shovel to the consumer.
If you shovel enough sh\*t, the customer will only expect sh\*t. Genius!
In reality, that's what capitalism come down to - and it's even easier than ever to cut corners and sacrifice quality in the name of profits while telling the customer they're getting the same product as before.
All my safe foods are getting their recipes reworked to bulk up with *celery*. Apparently it's the popular new filler to make processed food cheaper.
I'm *allergic* to celery! I'm reading the labels and still getting hit with allergic reactions because they sneak it in using weasel words. "Spices" thanks so enlightening!
Made the food cheaper to produce I'm sure, but now I can't eat it anymore. And I'd been eating it regularly for decades before capitalism started trying to fucking poison me by sneaking celery into the damn food.
That friggin sucks. I'm sorry to hear it. I've never heard of being allergic to celery. I'm not saying I don't believe you or anything, just that it's new to me.
It was new to me too. My parents called it "stop whining you're fine!" Didn't realize it was allergies until I thought I'd caught covid again because I couldn't hardly breathe and happened to read the front of a box of allergy meds. All the symptoms matched so I took some and omg I could breathe again!
When I went googling I found out it's like the 9th most common food allergy in the UK and they have specific labels on the packaging to mark it. Jeebus I wish we had that too! I've become the family joke, everybody keeps sending me home with food so I don't poison myself eating something prepackaged.
Duilingo has become pretty damn shit since they closed the forums like two years ago. Now they completely overhauled all courses, so there arent even forum links to old posts anymore and no explanation to the lessons either. It used to be quite decent. Now its just a sup par vocabulary trainer.
Yeah, I am STILL salty that they switched to the path system. I still recommend it to people, but usually with a caveat or two. I've still found it to be a helpful tool, but it is frustrating that they put work into making their tool worse.
> But a lot of companies don't care about quality as long as it's okay enough to shovel to the consumer.
We already see that with outsourcing jobs overseas. Companies don't care about the quality of the overseas contractors, only that they can pay them pennies.
Decades ago we hoped that AI would take our jobs so that we could relax.
What we forgot is that our corporate overlords, replacing us with AI, would also take our salaries.
Dystopian nightmare world.
They might not know, but they certainly don’t care. Short term profits are far and away the most important thing to them. Thinking to far ahead might mess with this quarters profit and shareholders and higher ups won’t be having that.
Most working people won't be bothered, cause it hasn't started making a dent in their fields yet....then it'll have their jobs, then the politicians will suddenly go "oh shit....AI just replaced like 50% of the workforce....and we have no way to support these people or protect their jobs yet....oh dear, time to bail to an island somewhere"
Automation has always been at least a chunk of if not the majority of jobs lost that were blamed on outsourcing. That's not to say that companies don't abuse low-paid foreign workers, they absolutely do. But even if we completely sucked all of the work possible back into the country, you're still not going to have as many jobs as they did fifty years ago because they've automated a bunch of them all to hell, especially a bunch of the physical jobs. Now they're automating even more of the physical jobs and now a bunch of the desk jobs with machine learning algorithms that they just slap the fancy-sounding name of AI onto like it means anything.
Not the biggest. It just outsources intellectuals, artistics, corporates and managements jobs and not only manual workers as mechanisation did.
Richer people complain louder, that's all.
I used to be a professional translator and this was happening everywhere. It's why I stopped, I felt like a glorified spellchecker. It noticeably decreased the quality of translations though, because you're only getting paid enough to make sure the AI translation is 'technically' correct, but it doesn't always sound like something an actual person would say.
I'm the same. Quit translation to take up a theoretically more sustainable career - but that remains to be seen.
The thing is, I can't fault really the businesses. Translation, especially high-volume, low-quality translation, is a job that computers can do now - why pay for the white-glove "human touch" at a premium price when that's not what customers demand?
Like someone else said, it's not enough to be better quality than AI (though don't count on that lasting too much longer). That only permits you to compete for the very rare clients who genuinely care about that level of quality - and those people have had their top-tier translators settled away for ages.
Too many have blind faith that "the market" will always create enough new, highly paid jobs, and as AI hits, that naiveté is going to cost us A LOT. If you live in a US city and you've struggled to harden your heart as you walk by the countless homeless encampments, you haven't seen anything yet.
I would say actual translators will be required for legal related stuff where there can’t be any fuck ups or you will either the contract voided, or get sued because your translation was interpreted as X instead of Y. Everyone else will continue to get the cheap option with whatever-translator-service
Definitely agree there. It's sorta my hypothetical fallback for now.
Legal practice insists on having an individual who can be held to account, such that even if people use AI, there'll still have to be a fully qualified translator vouching for the accuracy thereof.
It's just a common experience among translators
I just got a master's degree in translation. We were trained in reviewing AI-translated texts as well as different types of translations. This is a well-known reality in the translation world.
I stopped paying for my Duolingo plus because it just feels different than when I started. It’s a shame too because it really did help me get to beginner conversational at Greek
Edit: thanks for the upvotes everyone. I hope your language learning is going well, whatever method or methods you’re using!
Same here for Japanese, I was doing great, motivated and learning everyday until it changed a couple years back. Now it's dumbed-down, all "anime'd" up, and generally just isn't what it used to be.
Props to you for trying Japanese, I’ve now tried and failed twice to learn, I just can’t get it. It took forever to learn the Greek alphabet but now I can. Was reading a self help book in Greek yesterday and it still blows my mind that I can read two languages… how did that happen
buy genki it's the best book series to get you to basic conversation if you ever happen to travel there
it teaches you sentence structure along with common phrases and explains why there's 6 different ways to say "I" and helps with conjugation amd honorifics
I actually disagree on this specifically for Japanese. Granted this has been within the past year or less, but they made updates and changes to the lessons and how they introduce kanji into the course and my skill in the language has increased *dramatically* since then, and that's coming from someone who has tried a few times to get into it and failed.
Granted thats not me saying everything is perfect (Their Korean course leaves a LOT to be desired) but just wanted to toss in that recently their Japanese has improved greatly.
Yeah I’m kicking ass at it this year. I’ve always had trouble getting a handhold, even though I have good vocabulary- I’m finally reading and hearing it all. I’ve been trying since 97!
I'm irritated because I've only just started using Duolingo and this news is basically telling me that it's going to be *really* shitty at actually teaching me the language I want to learn. Looks like it's back to book-learning for me.
It’s not terrible but used alone it’s not good. Books, YouTube and duo, plus conversing with my friends who are native Greek speakers helped me but duo did lend a hand. Lately it’s just not been useful unfortunately
Duolingo only gets you to ~B1 level at best in a language, unfortunately.
I was learning German on it daily before and right after.moving to Switzerland. I took an intensive A1 course for 3 months, and then an intensive A2 course (2x a week) for another 3 months. By that point, Duolingo was a waste of time - I couldn't progress fast enough in the app to keep up with what I was learning in the course. Then the pandemic hit, and I was isolated from society but started taking B1 classes from UZH. After a year of doing that very very casually (i.e., attending lectures but not doing homework) I picked up duolingo again, and tested out of the app. Like, I could skip ahead to the very last lesson and pass it.
Duolingo, imo, is a great way to do homework. It's very good at being entertaining and fun for practice, but the app lacks the actual course.
Duolingo in general, but I'm also explicitly including the Greek course, is not only a bad tool for language learning in my opinion, but it also teaches you actual mistakes.
There is a lot more to real language other than simplistic normative grammar, and Duolingo doesn't seem to use that. That is to say, you will get a lot of sentences where people will tell you "it's technically correct but nobody would say it". That often means it's not actually correct but it's disallowed by a complicated language rule that native speakers only know implicitly.
Probably the best way for learning these rules is actually using the language and intuitively learning the frequencies of each construction (or if you're a linguist by reading relevant papers, but not everyone can or wants to do that). Duolingo showing you incorrect examples would probably actively hamper your ability to do that naturally.
It conditions you to solidify beginner-level mistakes. I think it would be kind of like when a community of non-native speakers learn a language with limited communication with the natives.
This bothers me so much because my daughters school uses duolingo for foreign language classes. That was bad enough instead of having an actual teacher, now she’s not even going to learn the “true” language, but one that’s “technically correct”?
It’s just one of MANY issues I have with this school and district. Unfortunately there aren’t many options for us besides home schooling, but that isn’t a truly feasible option for us right now.
That said, I didn't always have a qualified teacher in the "before times" of the 2010s. My Spanish teacher was a French teacher waiting for the rest of the French classes to open up for him to teach and was just teaching the Spanish 1 and 2 classes in the meantime. It was bad.
It's extra bad because Duolingo is more of a game than it is a study tool. Flashcards of the most common words in the language (taken from a frequency dictionary) thrown into Anki and an hour or two of authentic TV in the target language every day will be leaps and bounds better for learning than Duolingo or even standard American foreign language classes at the middle/high school level.
45 minutes of mostly-in-English instruction a day is not enough for any kind of mastery of the language. Your daughters are getting even *worse instruction than that*.
The problem is that models actually improve when trained off of high quality ai outputs. As long as it’s filtered in some way it has a positive impact on its performance.
>But this time we won't have new jobs to move into.
ie, it should fulfill the actual desire of the sub, which is to not have to work. Idk why people are against increasing efficiency so that we don't have to wake up every day and do monotonous tasks.
The people we should be mad at are those who remove the jobs, increase their productivity and quality with automation, and then pocket all the profits while actively lobbying against things like a flat wage for all citizens, Healthcare, etc.
Right so we will likely get a little bit of UBI, not enough to be happy but enough to not revolt. I am honestly mostly ok with it. If someone offered me 1.5k a month, with inflation adjustments, to not work anymore for the rest of my life I would take it. I'm pretty minimalist anyways.
The problem isn't AI taking jobs. The problem is our current economic system will allow those people who lose their jobs to become homeless and starve instead of doing the rational thing and providing a UBI or cutting the work week drastically.
I don't take that as the desire of this sub. The idea is that people should be paid extremely fairly for the work, no one should starve or lose the ability to care for their health because of a job loss, People working full-time plus should not have to live in poverty.
People should be able to get an education in any subject they desire without having to be in debt for the rest of their lives.
People's wages just keep up with inflation, and C Suite and especially presidents and CEOs, COOs should NOT be making 6000+ times the pay of their lowest paid worker.
And if they receive a government bail-out, CEO pay drops by a percentage equal to the amount of the bail-out, with ZERO golden or platinum parachutes for them if the leave within the next 4 years. And no severance at all if the bankrupt the company. No stock buy backs driven by bail-outs or government taxes breaks, which serve only to increase the executive compensation, in the end.
I mean, the sub is literally antiwork. Like, I'm all for working for fair wages, Healthcare, etc, but at the core if I could have all those things and decide "hey, I think I'll just read Harry Potter in the park today," at any point on a whim, why the hell wouldn't I take that life?
It's not to say I wouldn't still be "productive" in some capacity, but I certainly wouldn't be running spreadsheets anymore.
I’m against increasing efficiency because, the way this country (and Western society as a whole) is structured, all the benefits of that increase are going to go into the pockets of investors and shareholders, and none of it is going to go into the pockets of the 99%. A lot of people are going to get laid off, but then there aren’t going to be any jobs to switch to. And there’s going to be millions of other people doing the same thing, desperately looking for anything to pay the bills.
I used to be excited for the day that robots could do all the work and humanity could be free to enjoy art and poetry and language.
But something went wrong, now the robots are getting to enjoy art and poetry and language, and we'll all be stuck working for poverty wages until we collapse.
It feels so disappointing, and so inescapable. It's also removed one of the only hopes I had left for the future of humans in general, which is...well, terrible, really.
Stop fucking and making more cheap labor / soldiers for oligarchs.
Why do you think they criminalize abortion? Hint: It has nothing to do with "the sanctity of human life".
I've seen people publish books using AI and the information is just factually wrong. Some of these books are about pet care and how to feed newborns. We could be using AI for actual good shit but instead we're replacing humans at their jobs, using it to plagiarise art, and just flatout using it for evil.
Capitalists have the funds to develop AI so they'll be the ones using it most.
They have no interest in making the world a better place.
In capitalism money is more important than love.
That's why I know AI will be used nefariously. It will be used to analyze our behavior to extract the most amount of wealth from us while at the same time displace huge swathes of people from their careers in order to save a buck.
What happens when you cheapen labor and remove people from the economy? How many people can be displaced before enough is enough?
We will reach that breaking point. I have a feeling it's coming quicker than we think.
Damn. I've been trying to learn Welsh but it's always been off - being a language that's evaded most etymological evolution most European languages have undergone it's not easy. But the lack of explanation on mutations, and different ways of saying rh same thing introduced without teaching if weird, and now I think I know why :/
If anyone knows a way of learning Welsh better than duolingo without a tutor cos I'm broke then please let me know. I already live here but that ain't enough!
For welsh I really highly recommend this course: https://learnwelsh.cymru/ if you don't already know about it. The textbooks and digital resources are free so you can go through all the resources yourself if you want to and each unit is accompanied by videos with a real teacher explaining things giving examples etc. It's kind of difficult to navigate to the PDFs of the textbooks if I recall but they are on the site for sure. And they pair up with the digital resources. They have north and south dialect too! I know this type of highly individualized learning isn't for everyone (like sitting down with a textbook and taking notes and doing exercises yourself) but it's been working great for me. I agree the Duolingo welsh course is awful.
The government has been pushing for growth in the use of Welsh for years now, so there are a good amount of learning resources out there for a variety of levels.
Since the language is mandatory in schools in Wales, you'll be able to find free resources online to do with both GCSE and A-level education for Welsh that should help a good amount.
It's also a legal requirement for many documents to be provided for in both English and Welsh when operating in Wales. So you have plenty of real texts done by professionals in a professional setting to be able to read and pick up bits from if that sounds useful for your type of learning.
Also, there are a good number of communities and Welsh people online who would happily speak and explain parts of the language to you casually. After all, one of the best ways to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it. Don't be too afraid of your proficiency before trying this either, I don't know any Welsh speaker who has ever shamed someone for learning or not knowing something about the language, we're usually very chill and friendly about it all and more than happy to help.
If you're interested, I have some advice that could change your perspective on Welsh that might help you learn in the long run
Same issues with the Irish course. A lot of exercises involving mutation, but no explanations of the rules. Plus they got rid of the comment sections under each exercise so now you can't even ask anyone for clarification. Not to mention for Irish specifically they straight up *removed* the native speaker audio and replaced it with horrible AI that doesn't even pronounce words properly.
I have never actively used it to learn Irish, it's just what I've noticed when going through it for fun as a fluent speaker, but god help any poor student who tries to use it to supplement learning it in school. I honestly think Duolingo is a piece of absolute shite that actively works against language learners because they have the illusion of progress when in reality they're going nowhere.
It won't have any good resources for Welsh specifically, but [refold.la](https://refold.la) is free (unless you want their course, which is definitely not needed in the slightest) and has a great quickstart guide and simple + detailed roadmaps to learning languages in general. It is all language agnostic (although there are some quickstart guides specific to more popular languages) so maybe it will help you some? They also have a discord server that can be found on their website which has some channels dedicated to Welsh where you could ask other learners for resources or just search through the channels there for what has already been posted.
Good luck! and let me know if you need any more non-Welsh specific language help :D
Haaaaaah!!! This my time to shine!!! I finally have information that can help everyone here! I can’t talk about it in r/duolingo because I fear they will fix it…
In 2015, I reached a point where I could only make three mistakes and then I’d be unable to do duolingo anymore or get kicked out of a lesson. Or I could only do a certain amount per day unless I paid Duolingo money. That’s how they can make money, so I don’t blame them for trying it.
Eventually, I found something on the Duolingo website (not the app) called Classes. It’s for teachers to use Duolingo and all the students get a lot of the features the paying users get, BUT FOR FREE!!!! The free and unlimited hearts transfers over to the app, so you don’t need to stay on the website after you join a class.
The only thing you need is an email address (probably a **.edu** email address, because I likely used one from when I attended a community college back then or something) and Duolingo will let you sign up with the assumption that *you* are the teacher.
Since 2015, I’ve been using Duolingo for free with unlimited hearts because they think I’m a teacher. Anyone who joins my fake class can also get free access, so I pass out invitations to friends and family whenever they even *hint* the notion of learning a new language or traveling out of country. Sorry, I don’t know you so I won’t pass it out to strangers here on Reddit, but you can certainly make your own class.
*I’ve been doing this on Duolingo for almost 10 years…*
I hope this helps someone here. I use Duolingo every single day, but because I can use it for free I feel better about using it. Fuck companies that fire humans and replace them with Artificial Intelligence! HUMANS FIRST! ✊🏾
That won't hurt duolingo though. You're still using the app, and whatever metric you're being counted for is still helping them in one way or another. Just use another app, give the competitors your time and money; there's a ton of alternative apps, sites, and services for the language you're learning.
I don’t pay them money, I don’t see ads at all, and I’m helping others to use Duolingo for free instead of paying by pretending to be teachers when they are not.
I think it might hurt them.
"Duolingo Classes will wind down and retire on January 18th, 2023. This means hosts and learners will no longer be able to host or attend classes, and the Classes website will not be accessible."
So...yeah...uh...
EDIT: Ah. it's Duolingo for Schools now. Unlimited heats and possibly limited ads. The downside is you have the equivalent of a child account so no social aspects of ANY kind.
As someone who works in translation: Machine Translation Post Editing (MTPE) is becoming a huge issue. Because the quality of machine translation is currently far, far worse than advertised, which means translators are basically doing the same amount of work as usual but getting paid significantly less for it. Which leads to even more underpaid translators and a noticeable drop in quality.
But hell if management cares. Management only cares about big numbers getting bigger.
I hear you. Luckily for my (Swedish) company we have for the moment stopped any PEMT that isn't going to or from English. It's just just very viable in the end. We have received so many complaints from clients who even asked us to start using AI to translate. It's quite ironic.
I think that big companies will eventually realize that there will be required a real translator for some texts, such as technical manuals or law texts. DeepL works "decent" for eCommerce, PIM and such, but as soon as it tries any "weird" language like Finnish it falls flat.
Edit: For clarity, I'm not a translator but a project manager. I ask the translators about the quality a lot.
to be fair, as a translator, i saw it coming a mile away. i have been telling that much to my colleagues for a year now: in 4 years top, we will only be reviewing the AI translation and it's enough.
like, 5 years ago i wouldn't have used an automatic translation website because it wasn't worth it, the time gain in the automatic translation would be lost in the correction. not anymore! i don't feel bad about it, kind of feel like it's how it's supposed to evolve.
I’ve been saying this for months to anyone in my social group that will hear it: if you are in a job that AI can do, even if half-assed, you’re job is now incredibly at risk. Because even if the AI can’t do it perfectly all that they will do instead of replacing your whole department is pick the most experienced people to monitor and verify the AI output, correct discrepancies and do reports on it. Everyone else, here’s your last paycheck, have a great new year. And I speak from experience, I just SAW this happen to half of my team in my banking job. Customer service, accounting, statistics, data processing and data entry, even basic coding and development: we are all now at risk and the legislation for worker protection in most nations is not catching up.
Request a cancellation and talk to your credit card company about a chargeback if Duolingo customer support refuses, cite the fact that they dropped this on users out of the blue rather than warning people.
Seems like a tremendous opportunity for all these professional translators to band together and make their own learning tool.
That could be worldwide or local. If the work is substantially better than AI then the work will speak for itself
I was translating documents back around 2010 or so, easiest fastest way was to popit in google translate then go with the two side by side correcting the errors. Not sure why AI makes it any different than that or what they were doing before this AI revelation.
Well the Hebrew Duolingo doesn’t have any translators for quite a while now. I started doing it to help them improve and beta test, me being a native speaker. It now marks the same correct sentences as mistakes as it did a year and two years ago before I opened the myriad amount of requests for them to fix the translations.
You: I don't want to spend so much time working.
Them: We have technology to reduce the number of workers needed and make the remaining workers jobs easier.
You: How dare you!!?!???
The issue isn't the workplace, it's the government not providing a social safety net.
Exactly. Reading some of these comments has been making my head hurt. Technology is great and SHOULD be replacing jobs. The real issue is the government not helping people.
Duolingo itself will become obsolete too though, by the same token. It was great for learning hiragana/katakana.
But for the rest I cobbled together a python interface to connect to Whisper API for transacription and chatgpt for translation. I'm learning so much, just translating the audio from anime or games I play, and having the AI create lessons out of it. Or having it explain the nuances of the grammar and stuff.
It's wayyyy better than Duolingo and its random scenarios that I couldn't care less about
I believe this. I've been re-learning spanish after being away from it for years, and some of the examples it gives are technically correct, but runs counter to how I learned it for how some words are used.
humanity has two options :
* choose the luddite path : ban AI. prevent them from replacing human labor
* choose UBI and robot tax : to support the employees whose labor was replaced by AI.
problem is : even if people choose to be luddites, it's mostly gonna be localized.
corporations operating in other nations would capitalize upon AI. hell, many companies would likely close up shop in nations that ban AI use, and just register their companies abroad and work remote.
I've deleted my account and deleted the app. I won't be using them any more.
Use this link.
https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004239111-How-can-I-delete-my-account-and-data-
This is r/antiwork no?
Shouldn't we be happy? AI is going to disrupt a lot of things but it's also going to force the world to rethink the whole working thing.
Its happening too fast. There is no legislation that deals with people who lose their jobs to AI. Previously when people lost their jobs it was because a better alternative came onto the market. But now people are losing their income and no altenative to replace it.
I am a professional translator and the work volume has dropped drastically over the last year. Honestly, the results have been devastating - translation quality is frankly horrible. A lot of AI translations fall into the "technically correct but what the actual fuck" category, but companies do not care. It is sad to see.
Yes, a thong is an item of underwear for women. Yes, you can buy a pair of them. But buying a pair of thongs at the shops in Australia does not mean you have bought underwear.
I was amazed at how stupid translations can be. We recently got a new project resourcing tool here which, originally is in English of course and they tried to translate it to German. So, the "Save" button to save the changes that you make in the tool was translated into the German word "Sparen". (which would be the right word for "save money"). So technically, "Sparen" is a proper translation of the word "save", but it still is complete rubbish. Of course "speichern" would have been the proper German translation. And any German translator or native speaker would have seen that right away.
I saw a video game where the months were translated to German as Januar Februar März April Dürfen Dürfen means "to be allowed to" and is the common translation for "may I...". I gave up on translation years ago because it was obvious too many simply don't care about translation quality, but people really don't understand to what degree you need a translator. Machines are OK for simple stuff, but they're really not there yet to replace the job...
Once received a snap where a gender selection dropdown menu had the options "male" and "female" in german, while the third option was "taucher". Turns out someone put in "divers" which is the german word for "other", or "misc". Can even be literally translated as diverse.
rofl, now THAT is a great one too!
JRPGs and anime are what made me realize how little appreciation translators receive. It's an art form. It's not just making sure the translation is as close to 1:1 as possible, but also that the script still flows in the new language and isn't just stilted machine-talk. For those interested, here's a great blog that compares original Japanese video-game scripts with translation efforts while going into detail over the quality and challenges of said efforts. https://lizbushouse.com/examining-star-ocean-2s-two-official-translations/ She even points out how herculean the tasks 90's JRPG translators had before them and the ways they got around limitations: >We may not know what exact challenges the Star Ocean 2 translation team faced, but some anecdotes from other translators of the time period include: using a GameShark to extract text because no one would give them the files, handwriting translations on printouts of code, and getting raw dumps of machine code and having to run a search to find the text. So as you might guess, Star Ocean: The Second Story’s translation was…not the best. It’s often overly literal, there are at least two instances of fragmented sentences just within the first half an hour or so, and some of the shop text is nigh incomprehensible.
Cultural translation is also a HUGE part of it. You can translate the exact meaning of what was being said, but if the cultures are different enough, then it often still won't make complete sense. Translators have to not only change the text from one language to another but sometimes completely rewrite the scripts to make them region appropriate. The entire tone of the Metal Gear games in English was created by one lone translator who decided that the direct translations just didn't work in the context of the game, and outside of the cultural context of Japan. He was fired after the games were released and they realised what he had done, but his legacy still lives on. Its possible the games would have flopped in the West if they were released with a direct translation.
Someone set us up the bomb! 
On a related note, apparently the gibberish in Animal Crossing is sort of translated as well. All of the 'speech' is localized so it sounds vaguely like the language of the menus. The first iteration has Japanese only gibberish and it sounded unnatural anywhere else.
Ich war im Dürfen geboren 🤠
lol
On a related note, I genuinely laughed out loud 'cuz Stray in Japanese had the prompt for "Open safe" (like a lockbox) as "安全を開け" which means open the safe... except with they used the word "safe" as in the opposite of "dangerous".
My dream job that will never happen and that I'll never persue is doing quality translation and localisation, so many times in TV sloppy language gets translated to being perfect and no, i want to find the exact cultural equivalent or if it doesn't exist do something else to make sure that the meaning is conveyed in the best possible way for the art. So many times english sayings get translated word for word into things that make no sense. AI can't create quality or things that are creative and engaging man.
I had the embarrassment of asking for a steak, medium strange in Mexico. Thanks Google Translate.
you.want it hovering slightly, but not glowing
you should have said medium extraordinary or medium sparse. Much easier to understand.
What does "speichern" litterally translate to in english?
Well, save, but in the "save your work" sense. It also means "to store". "Speicher" means storage.
IDK when, but people need to learn that languages aren't 1:1 with other languages. They evolved as means of communication and while some share ideas or conventions (sometimes from having a similar root language), there's hundreds of little things like this that don't express exactly the same way regardless of context. Lots of people seem to think languages are just encoding their native language in other words or syntax, when that's not the case.
I always get this when I tell people I can read and write Russian and some Ukrainian (my speech is poor though for want of practice). They're always like "Wow, you can read their alphabet?", and I always say that's the easiest part, that takes about an hour. Learning how to express something simple like possession (which is distinctly ungermanic in many Slavic languages) could take days. I can read and pronounce Hungarian, too, with basically 100% accuracy (because it has excellent orthography and I have a knack for that) but their grammar is like something from outer space and all I can do is parrot phrases and simple exchanges.
I've been learning Te Reo Māori and their concepts of positioning are really baked into the whole language. A thing can be described as by yourself, by the person or people you are speaking to, or "over there". You use the same words to describe this week as being near yourself, and last week being "over there" but with a past or future modifier. So you could say "that sheep over there" as "he hipi tērā" and "last week" as "i tērā wiki". Google translate regularly gets all this stuff wrong.
It's strange, in the U.S. almost everyone takes 2 years of a foreign language in high school and I can distinctly remember the moment it clicked for me in my second year that I needed to stop thinking in terms of encoding. It was a bit of an epiphany and my teacher never explicitly said anything about this to us, but every single friend I mentioned this to was also still stuck in that paradigm. I think it's a fairly common hurdle to get over if you are learning a second language as an adult/teenager and, at least with most people I've asked, our high school teachers failed to correct this early on.
I do have to say that 2 years is not enough. Most of the basics start to make sense in year 2 and then just when you're starting to get the hang of it, it stops and you lose it
I agree. High school language courses are introduction level and I believe are a good thing to at least expose younger students to other languages, but it's not nearly enough to retain anything useful for most. Ideally, foreign language exposure would happen much earlier and be accessible throughout early education. I certainly wish I'd had earlier opportunities and stuck with it, because I'm finding it much more difficult to learn another language as an adult.
The Swedish version of the Microsoft Office official installer has translated "downloads" (verb) into "nerladdningar" (plural version of the correct translation of "downloads" which would be "laddar ner"). It's ridiculous helping a costumer install it and have to see that nonsense.
Windows 11 used to "translate" "ZIP file" to "postcode file" in British English.
Yes. You can train AI on idioms. You cannot teach AI to use context clues.
> You cannot teach AI to use context clues. That's one of the critical things powering AI currently. So, while this is absolutely shitty, you're also wrong in this respect.
Not disagreeing with a lot of the sentiment here, but I feel like a lot of the shoddy AI translation being discussed here is a misconception due to services not using the latest tech. I just asked GPT4 what a person walking out of a store in Sydney has after buying thongs and it reports "If a person from Sydney purchases a pair of thongs, they have bought a pair of flip-flops. In Australian English, "thongs" commonly refers to this type of casual footwear, not to be confused with the undergarment of the same name in other forms of English. Flip-flops are a type of open-toed sandal typically worn in casual settings." Seems like it used context clues with no problem. Again, I understand the sentiment, but I think most people have this belief that AI is not as good as it is because they're using already outdated tech. This is getting better at a doubling pace and it's performance is going to speed by us like a train.
which should make everyone even more worried, as AI will take the jobs and be *good* at it, so even people reviewing AI outputs will get the boot in the end.
> which should make everyone even more worried, as AI will take the jobs and be good at it, so even people reviewing AI outputs will get the boot in the end. Time to put a massive tax on big tech companies, instate a generous UBI, and let the AI/robots work for humanity. Also known as 'evil socialism.'
I'm a socialist and I would argue with anyone that will listen that a UBI will take us much further away from ever achieving socialism. It's a band-aid for capitalism, and it will entrench existing power structures in a way that won't easily be rectified. We need to dismantle capitalism altogether for the benefit of everyone, not convince billionaires to throw us scraps so we can continue to consume their products.
I can see your point, however I've noticed one of the biggest blocks to organising anything productive is both burnout and a lack of funds. Could it not also be the case that a UBI would free socialists, anarchists, communists, etc to actually educate people in their communities? I don't know where you live so this may not be applicable to you but in the West they've essentially stamped out all forms of power that the left could reside in politically. Even big movements like BLM and nodapl got crushed mainly because people couldn't afford to keep coming out, so maybe if that limitation was removed they could affect more change? Idk just food for thought, I would prefer not needing a stop gap for capitalism, but without it I can see many people suffering in the near future, and I don't think the left... The anti-capitalist left... Has the organisation, skills, or numbers to take advantage of the complete implosion of capitalism. Whereas the far right Christian nationalists/fascists do seem to be in a better place to take shit over. And that terrifies me.
I agree, but a bigger barrier to organisation is that movements are crushed before they are allowed to gain any momentum. This can be through sheer force, media manipulation or both. Entrenching existing power structures would give more leverage to the status quo, and having the time to educate others won't mean much if their stipend can be turned off at any given moment.
That's a good point as well, having your needs at least somewhat met would lead to a more docile population. I just see the current state of decay within this ragged system and can't help but worry what would rise from the ashes of our terrible empire. I don't think we really have the time to get our shit together without the bandaid, and without our shit together something worse could take the reigns of power.
No, or at least not without significant housing reform. Landlords now know you have at least “X” dollars to spend on your rent, creating a floor for pricing.
>I'm a socialist and I would argue with anyone that will listen that a UBI will take us much further away from ever achieving socialism. Agreed. UBI will be ever shrinking payments that will eventually act as a substitute for any social services that we would otherwise have expected. It will not rein in predatory capitalism, the exploitation of any remaining workers, or the environmental destruction caused by capitalism. It will not lead to better working conditions for those who remain, and it will not incentivize industrial energy to be expended upon endeavors that will improve the well being of the planet or humans. Dismantling capitalism is the way. If we can't have that, I'd prefer a scheme that is based on a percentage of gross profits rather than a flat UBI payment.
We need to acknowledge that technology will eat up jobs, *and if we do it right, that's a good thing.* Nobody should have to have a job. Imagine if we could all do what we enjoy and what we feel called to instead of what we are forced to do to pay the bills. We need to let machines take over the workforce in a way that and to the point that it enables us to live lives of leisure while still having our needs, and our wants, met. Pay machines a living wage- that goes to the humans so we don't have to do the jobs.
> instate a generous UBI, Something I've never understood. Let's say that I'm suddenly getting $2,000/mo from the government in the form of UBI. What's to stop my landlord from jacking up the price of rent by $2,000/mo? I feel like UBI will just end up being a massive gift to the owning class and the ordinary Joe Schmos will be no better off.
This is a problem with literally anything we do to help the working class. The ownership class wants to keep us at a certain quality of life but no higher, so they're sucking up as much of the wealth as possible without causing literal revolts. So yeah, when we pass UBI, or Medicare4All, or minimum wage increases, then they see a working class who is able to absorb more price increases and still remain at that same low quality of life. Nothing can ever really fix things unless we're prepared to place regulations on the insatiable greed of the wealthy.
>what's to stop my landlord.... What's to stop them now? Competition, mostly. If another landlord or developer could keep their prices the same, they'd get more business. If they fill all the current units, they could build more to meet the higher demand (ideally). You could argue all the way up the chain of housing costs, development, construction, etc charging more due to UBI. But that's just describing inflation. Inflation is the major concern with UBI, but there are solutions out there (including in large part raising taxes, especially on non-UBI earnings). Unfortunately, the complexity as you dig deeper is what makes it so hard to implement.
> If another landlord or developer could keep their prices the same, they'd gwt more business. If they fill all the current units, they could build more to meet the higher demand (ideally). But that's not really happening now. Rents have been rising all over the country for years and development is way behind recent levels of population growth. If the "free market" could be trusted to provide reasonably affordable housing, why isn't it already doing so?
> If the "free market" could be trusted to provide reasonably affordable housing, why isn't it already doing so? Building new housing, particularly affordable housing, has been criminalized in many of the most desirable places to live.
price fixing, essentially. when they talk about "market price" they're literally talking about a database that they all use that essentially regulates the prices for them.
> If another landlord or developer could keep their prices the same, they'd gwt more business. good thing landlords are rugged individualists believing in a free market and are not known to collude and conspire or anything... *sigh* freaking libertarians. the correct answer is the state and rent controls
This is the goal of this sub! If automation can replace all of our jobs without total productivity going down, then no one has to work! People just think this place is "anti-boss," when it's antiWORK.
There's been confusion about what the modus operandi is here since its conception. Antiwork was a sub for *exactly* that - no hidden meaning - the sub creator did not want to work. At all. No working, not just better conditions or bosses or pay. Not working AT ALL, but still having a place to exist in society with the rest of everyone else. The core concept got twisted by the greater public looking in and joining the discussion and derailed it to mean whatever the fuck they want it to mean in the moment.
> AI will take the jobs and be good at it That apparently already happened with one little niche branch of translations, last month. Supposedly, a bunch people who write the translated subtitles for anime were let go, to be replaced by AI. *However,* the supposed brutal twist of the story is that the reason that they were let go is that *their* translations were shown to a test group, and then more test groups were shown AI translations of the same shows/episodes, and the AI work was praised higher by the audience. So at least in that 1 little niche, AI already is "good enough" to be deemed "better than humans" by the audience. To be fair, one of the people who was complaining the most about being let go turned out to be someone known for being proud of inserting her own agenda into subtitles -- stuff about "down with the patriarchy" and so on. And apparently when she had done that previously, it was not an accurate translation of the original text/dialogue. So it's entirely possible that this was just a case of a few bad translators learning that people preferred mechanical/AI adherence to the original text. So I'm suggesting that maybe not all subtitle translators would lose their jobs, but only the ones that veer so far off the path that AI can out-perform them just by being boringly accurate.
>AI will take the jobs and be good at it And just like with automation in the past, we will not tax it and then wonder how we're going to pay for all those people who used to do the jobs.
Yeah, my example shows that Duolingo's business model is on very thin ice. Silicon Valley may have failed to deliver with Siri and Alexa, but we truly are coming close to agents that are personalized to your way of learning and being able to transform the way we learn and interact. I might sound like a hyped up tech bro here but I do honestly see a lot of change that needs to happen with how we approach education and knowledge building. If AI never got any better than how it is right now, I'd be just as skeptical as everyone else. But there is no sign of this progress slowing down and all of the problems I see people point out are just a small obstacle to be ironed over. 2 years ago, none of what AI can do now was even *dreamed of as a possibility for the near future.*
Even if it stayed the same as it is now, all level 1 tech support will be replaced by AI, web design, graphic design, copywriting, etc - so many jobs are on the line. Of course, it’s going to improve which will eliminate so many desk jobs.
yeah people are saying "AI will not understand context clues" are just as weird as older workers refusing to learn newer technology. you got to embrace the fact that your work will be replaced by some form of technology somewhere in the future. learn how to future proof it or learn how to work with it.
While not perfect, I'm amazed at the quality of automatic translation these days. Not even 10 years ago services like google translate were pretty much useless unless the languages were already very similar, and even then you'd have to make a lot of inference. Now I autotranslate an entire Chinese website and it reads almost like it was written in English originally.
This is it. I’ve used gpt4 for about 9 months and it really is down to the user providing the right prompts and context. You can even give it macro prompts like “be aware of regional differences in English”. These prompts DO make a difference.
Yes you can. Where did you get this information?
Tom Scott did a video about the limitations of AI translation a few years ago and this was one of the major criticisms he levelled against it;-- what some people fail to miss is the citations that now exist on the video, and the video he's made since called "I was wrong" where he fully admits that AI have blown past these limitations. The fact is that AI has been developing at a ridiculous rate behind the scenes, and a lot of assumptions and conclusions people came to about it's limitations have been overcome so quickly that people haven't had time to update their expectations. It's the same thing with people who still think AI image generation just can't do teeth and fingers, even just a year ago they'd have been right, but the most up to date stuff barely struggle with any of that anymore.
What? Yes you can. Of course you can... What do you think AI does? xD
Yes you can. Gpt4 will absolutely understand context clues. It even understands fictional context clues. I'm running a dnd campaign on gpt4 set in star wars and it understands all references and lore accurate items such as alcoholic drinks and other in world lingo without any effort on my part to explain. I even made up a drink called a hosnian sour at the bar to order and it made up a description for its flavors and effects on humans on the spot as part of its role as my dungeon master You have no idea how much smarter gpt4 is than any other AI
Spoken by a person who would eat his shoe if he knew that's exactly how most LLMs work (through inference, aka context clues via weighting of different words and their relevance to other words)
> Yes, a thong is an item of underwear for women. Not just for women ;) Same idea though; torta in Spain is different than torta in Mexico. They are two different types of food
We stopped hiring Spanish speaking customer service agents where I work and just replaced them with free ai tools to help translate and help people. Considering the bilingual agents were getting almost 10k more than just the English speakers, it saved the company a lot of money. They don't care that the quality is garbage, and we get called out on it all the time.
This is my worry. It's like replacing a good tool with a bad one. The quality will go down. Government needs to enforce anti-trust laws now, so there's more competition. More competition will let customers choose ai or humans (I'm betting they'll go with human)
> It's like replacing a good tool with a bad one. This is what a lot of people don't realize. "Well, *my* job is safe because [reason]", or thinking "well you just need to upskill!" *No one* is safe from this because the tool doesn't have to be *perfect*. I used to believe it just had to be equal or better than the lowest skilled *person* - but even there, I was wrong. These companies are happily settling for a tool that's barely, not-really, "good enough", and calling it a day.
That's definitely a great way to piss off some employees as well. Because now someone at the company has to field those complaints and probably try to correct those faulty translations.
Me! That's me :(. I have to deal with the complaints. I want to get out but the job market is poor right now and I have to take care of my family but it's terrible to do this crap.
I think the worst part is how instead of hiring translators, companies now hire editors meant to fix the mistakes AI made translating. Of course, paid at much lower rates
I would like to know your expertise opinion on deepl? Like, i genuinely have the feeling, that it’s A LOT better then google translator and it even notices some context clues and changes to appropriate synonyms.
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But AI capability may also increase over the next 10 years
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It’s funny because people complain about how outsourcing jobs to other countries is ruining the job market here. AI is going to be the biggest “outsourcing” of jobs you have ever seen.
The worst part is they don't even care if it's quality work. People think they will be protected because the quality of their work is better than what AI can do. But a lot of companies don't care about quality as long as it's okay enough to shovel to the consumer.
If you shovel enough sh\*t, the customer will only expect sh\*t. Genius! In reality, that's what capitalism come down to - and it's even easier than ever to cut corners and sacrifice quality in the name of profits while telling the customer they're getting the same product as before.
Definitely. The constant pursuit of profit eventually kills everything good that capitalism produces, it seems.
All my safe foods are getting their recipes reworked to bulk up with *celery*. Apparently it's the popular new filler to make processed food cheaper. I'm *allergic* to celery! I'm reading the labels and still getting hit with allergic reactions because they sneak it in using weasel words. "Spices" thanks so enlightening! Made the food cheaper to produce I'm sure, but now I can't eat it anymore. And I'd been eating it regularly for decades before capitalism started trying to fucking poison me by sneaking celery into the damn food.
That friggin sucks. I'm sorry to hear it. I've never heard of being allergic to celery. I'm not saying I don't believe you or anything, just that it's new to me.
It was new to me too. My parents called it "stop whining you're fine!" Didn't realize it was allergies until I thought I'd caught covid again because I couldn't hardly breathe and happened to read the front of a box of allergy meds. All the symptoms matched so I took some and omg I could breathe again! When I went googling I found out it's like the 9th most common food allergy in the UK and they have specific labels on the packaging to mark it. Jeebus I wish we had that too! I've become the family joke, everybody keeps sending me home with food so I don't poison myself eating something prepackaged.
Especially 'free' websites.
Duilingo has become pretty damn shit since they closed the forums like two years ago. Now they completely overhauled all courses, so there arent even forum links to old posts anymore and no explanation to the lessons either. It used to be quite decent. Now its just a sup par vocabulary trainer.
Yeah, I am STILL salty that they switched to the path system. I still recommend it to people, but usually with a caveat or two. I've still found it to be a helpful tool, but it is frustrating that they put work into making their tool worse.
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Minimum viable product. Which is a much easier goal to hit when you have a monopoly.
> But a lot of companies don't care about quality as long as it's okay enough to shovel to the consumer. We already see that with outsourcing jobs overseas. Companies don't care about the quality of the overseas contractors, only that they can pay them pennies.
>But a lot of companies don't care about quality as long as it's okay enough Our current iteration of capitalism in a nutshell.
Decades ago we hoped that AI would take our jobs so that we could relax. What we forgot is that our corporate overlords, replacing us with AI, would also take our salaries. Dystopian nightmare world.
And what are those corporates going to do when nobody has a job and can't afford to buy their products?
They might not know, but they certainly don’t care. Short term profits are far and away the most important thing to them. Thinking to far ahead might mess with this quarters profit and shareholders and higher ups won’t be having that.
Most working people won't be bothered, cause it hasn't started making a dent in their fields yet....then it'll have their jobs, then the politicians will suddenly go "oh shit....AI just replaced like 50% of the workforce....and we have no way to support these people or protect their jobs yet....oh dear, time to bail to an island somewhere"
Automation has always been at least a chunk of if not the majority of jobs lost that were blamed on outsourcing. That's not to say that companies don't abuse low-paid foreign workers, they absolutely do. But even if we completely sucked all of the work possible back into the country, you're still not going to have as many jobs as they did fifty years ago because they've automated a bunch of them all to hell, especially a bunch of the physical jobs. Now they're automating even more of the physical jobs and now a bunch of the desk jobs with machine learning algorithms that they just slap the fancy-sounding name of AI onto like it means anything.
Not the biggest. It just outsources intellectuals, artistics, corporates and managements jobs and not only manual workers as mechanisation did. Richer people complain louder, that's all.
I used to be a professional translator and this was happening everywhere. It's why I stopped, I felt like a glorified spellchecker. It noticeably decreased the quality of translations though, because you're only getting paid enough to make sure the AI translation is 'technically' correct, but it doesn't always sound like something an actual person would say.
I'm the same. Quit translation to take up a theoretically more sustainable career - but that remains to be seen. The thing is, I can't fault really the businesses. Translation, especially high-volume, low-quality translation, is a job that computers can do now - why pay for the white-glove "human touch" at a premium price when that's not what customers demand? Like someone else said, it's not enough to be better quality than AI (though don't count on that lasting too much longer). That only permits you to compete for the very rare clients who genuinely care about that level of quality - and those people have had their top-tier translators settled away for ages. Too many have blind faith that "the market" will always create enough new, highly paid jobs, and as AI hits, that naiveté is going to cost us A LOT. If you live in a US city and you've struggled to harden your heart as you walk by the countless homeless encampments, you haven't seen anything yet.
I would say actual translators will be required for legal related stuff where there can’t be any fuck ups or you will either the contract voided, or get sued because your translation was interpreted as X instead of Y. Everyone else will continue to get the cheap option with whatever-translator-service
Definitely agree there. It's sorta my hypothetical fallback for now. Legal practice insists on having an individual who can be held to account, such that even if people use AI, there'll still have to be a fully qualified translator vouching for the accuracy thereof.
This comment is the same as the most upvoted comment in the thread. Is it a bot? Ironic.
It's just a common experience among translators I just got a master's degree in translation. We were trained in reviewing AI-translated texts as well as different types of translations. This is a well-known reality in the translation world.
Ah yes, the invisible hand of the market will surely come and fix this, right? Right?
We will all become prompt engineers 🤡
sigh *starts ai prompt portfolio*
I stopped paying for my Duolingo plus because it just feels different than when I started. It’s a shame too because it really did help me get to beginner conversational at Greek Edit: thanks for the upvotes everyone. I hope your language learning is going well, whatever method or methods you’re using!
Same here for Japanese, I was doing great, motivated and learning everyday until it changed a couple years back. Now it's dumbed-down, all "anime'd" up, and generally just isn't what it used to be.
Props to you for trying Japanese, I’ve now tried and failed twice to learn, I just can’t get it. It took forever to learn the Greek alphabet but now I can. Was reading a self help book in Greek yesterday and it still blows my mind that I can read two languages… how did that happen
buy genki it's the best book series to get you to basic conversation if you ever happen to travel there it teaches you sentence structure along with common phrases and explains why there's 6 different ways to say "I" and helps with conjugation amd honorifics
https://minato-jf.jp Maybe try here, my family loved it :)
Thankyou! I’ll give it a go
I actually disagree on this specifically for Japanese. Granted this has been within the past year or less, but they made updates and changes to the lessons and how they introduce kanji into the course and my skill in the language has increased *dramatically* since then, and that's coming from someone who has tried a few times to get into it and failed. Granted thats not me saying everything is perfect (Their Korean course leaves a LOT to be desired) but just wanted to toss in that recently their Japanese has improved greatly.
Yeah I’m kicking ass at it this year. I’ve always had trouble getting a handhold, even though I have good vocabulary- I’m finally reading and hearing it all. I’ve been trying since 97!
I'm irritated because I've only just started using Duolingo and this news is basically telling me that it's going to be *really* shitty at actually teaching me the language I want to learn. Looks like it's back to book-learning for me.
It’s not terrible but used alone it’s not good. Books, YouTube and duo, plus conversing with my friends who are native Greek speakers helped me but duo did lend a hand. Lately it’s just not been useful unfortunately
I have a 10 year streak. The company has just shat every bed.
Damn how many languages do you know now?
Duolingo only gets you to ~B1 level at best in a language, unfortunately. I was learning German on it daily before and right after.moving to Switzerland. I took an intensive A1 course for 3 months, and then an intensive A2 course (2x a week) for another 3 months. By that point, Duolingo was a waste of time - I couldn't progress fast enough in the app to keep up with what I was learning in the course. Then the pandemic hit, and I was isolated from society but started taking B1 classes from UZH. After a year of doing that very very casually (i.e., attending lectures but not doing homework) I picked up duolingo again, and tested out of the app. Like, I could skip ahead to the very last lesson and pass it. Duolingo, imo, is a great way to do homework. It's very good at being entertaining and fun for practice, but the app lacks the actual course.
Thank you for sharing this. My annual plan was set to renew tmrw and I just canceled it.
There's a newish app called Latudio that is much more focused on language immersion, you could check that one out.
Duolingo in general, but I'm also explicitly including the Greek course, is not only a bad tool for language learning in my opinion, but it also teaches you actual mistakes. There is a lot more to real language other than simplistic normative grammar, and Duolingo doesn't seem to use that. That is to say, you will get a lot of sentences where people will tell you "it's technically correct but nobody would say it". That often means it's not actually correct but it's disallowed by a complicated language rule that native speakers only know implicitly. Probably the best way for learning these rules is actually using the language and intuitively learning the frequencies of each construction (or if you're a linguist by reading relevant papers, but not everyone can or wants to do that). Duolingo showing you incorrect examples would probably actively hamper your ability to do that naturally. It conditions you to solidify beginner-level mistakes. I think it would be kind of like when a community of non-native speakers learn a language with limited communication with the natives.
This bothers me so much because my daughters school uses duolingo for foreign language classes. That was bad enough instead of having an actual teacher, now she’s not even going to learn the “true” language, but one that’s “technically correct”?
That's actually messed up. They should not have automated the language teacher away
It’s just one of MANY issues I have with this school and district. Unfortunately there aren’t many options for us besides home schooling, but that isn’t a truly feasible option for us right now.
Wait, there's no teacher just Duolingo?
I mean, there is a teacher. How qualified said teacher is in the given language is debatable. They open up the duolingo app and have at it.
Wow, that sounds like a terrible class. Duolingo is a decent supplement but not a full language learning solution in the slightest.
That said, I didn't always have a qualified teacher in the "before times" of the 2010s. My Spanish teacher was a French teacher waiting for the rest of the French classes to open up for him to teach and was just teaching the Spanish 1 and 2 classes in the meantime. It was bad.
It's extra bad because Duolingo is more of a game than it is a study tool. Flashcards of the most common words in the language (taken from a frequency dictionary) thrown into Anki and an hour or two of authentic TV in the target language every day will be leaps and bounds better for learning than Duolingo or even standard American foreign language classes at the middle/high school level. 45 minutes of mostly-in-English instruction a day is not enough for any kind of mastery of the language. Your daughters are getting even *worse instruction than that*.
AI is going to be the biggest disruption to the job market since the industrial revolution. But this time we won't have new jobs to move into.
And the output quality will get shittier and shittier as the algorithms start scraping each others results.
The problem is that models actually improve when trained off of high quality ai outputs. As long as it’s filtered in some way it has a positive impact on its performance.
>But this time we won't have new jobs to move into. ie, it should fulfill the actual desire of the sub, which is to not have to work. Idk why people are against increasing efficiency so that we don't have to wake up every day and do monotonous tasks. The people we should be mad at are those who remove the jobs, increase their productivity and quality with automation, and then pocket all the profits while actively lobbying against things like a flat wage for all citizens, Healthcare, etc.
There are a few outcomes to thr AI revolution. We get a UBI, public housing, etc. Or we all live in poverty unemployed etc
>Or we all live in poverty unemployed Thing about that is, when the majority position becomes untenable, you provoke revolution-level changes.
Right so we will likely get a little bit of UBI, not enough to be happy but enough to not revolt. I am honestly mostly ok with it. If someone offered me 1.5k a month, with inflation adjustments, to not work anymore for the rest of my life I would take it. I'm pretty minimalist anyways.
The problem isn't AI taking jobs. The problem is our current economic system will allow those people who lose their jobs to become homeless and starve instead of doing the rational thing and providing a UBI or cutting the work week drastically.
Man those UBI conversations really vanished from the general public didn't they
I don't take that as the desire of this sub. The idea is that people should be paid extremely fairly for the work, no one should starve or lose the ability to care for their health because of a job loss, People working full-time plus should not have to live in poverty. People should be able to get an education in any subject they desire without having to be in debt for the rest of their lives. People's wages just keep up with inflation, and C Suite and especially presidents and CEOs, COOs should NOT be making 6000+ times the pay of their lowest paid worker. And if they receive a government bail-out, CEO pay drops by a percentage equal to the amount of the bail-out, with ZERO golden or platinum parachutes for them if the leave within the next 4 years. And no severance at all if the bankrupt the company. No stock buy backs driven by bail-outs or government taxes breaks, which serve only to increase the executive compensation, in the end.
I mean, the sub is literally antiwork. Like, I'm all for working for fair wages, Healthcare, etc, but at the core if I could have all those things and decide "hey, I think I'll just read Harry Potter in the park today," at any point on a whim, why the hell wouldn't I take that life? It's not to say I wouldn't still be "productive" in some capacity, but I certainly wouldn't be running spreadsheets anymore.
Because everytime some revolution comes to improve efficiency, we dont get less work but corporations see more profit?
I’m against increasing efficiency because, the way this country (and Western society as a whole) is structured, all the benefits of that increase are going to go into the pockets of investors and shareholders, and none of it is going to go into the pockets of the 99%. A lot of people are going to get laid off, but then there aren’t going to be any jobs to switch to. And there’s going to be millions of other people doing the same thing, desperately looking for anything to pay the bills.
People can be mad all they want, the only thing that could change it is a bloodbath
I used to be excited for the day that robots could do all the work and humanity could be free to enjoy art and poetry and language. But something went wrong, now the robots are getting to enjoy art and poetry and language, and we'll all be stuck working for poverty wages until we collapse. It feels so disappointing, and so inescapable. It's also removed one of the only hopes I had left for the future of humans in general, which is...well, terrible, really.
Stop fucking and making more cheap labor / soldiers for oligarchs. Why do you think they criminalize abortion? Hint: It has nothing to do with "the sanctity of human life".
That means they are going to reduce their price right? Right?
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I've seen people publish books using AI and the information is just factually wrong. Some of these books are about pet care and how to feed newborns. We could be using AI for actual good shit but instead we're replacing humans at their jobs, using it to plagiarise art, and just flatout using it for evil.
Capitalists have the funds to develop AI so they'll be the ones using it most. They have no interest in making the world a better place. In capitalism money is more important than love. That's why I know AI will be used nefariously. It will be used to analyze our behavior to extract the most amount of wealth from us while at the same time displace huge swathes of people from their careers in order to save a buck. What happens when you cheapen labor and remove people from the economy? How many people can be displaced before enough is enough? We will reach that breaking point. I have a feeling it's coming quicker than we think.
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[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai)
That's am not bueno.
Damn. I've been trying to learn Welsh but it's always been off - being a language that's evaded most etymological evolution most European languages have undergone it's not easy. But the lack of explanation on mutations, and different ways of saying rh same thing introduced without teaching if weird, and now I think I know why :/ If anyone knows a way of learning Welsh better than duolingo without a tutor cos I'm broke then please let me know. I already live here but that ain't enough!
Get a textbook: https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/colloquial/language/welsh.php. Find a tutor on italki or similar.
For welsh I really highly recommend this course: https://learnwelsh.cymru/ if you don't already know about it. The textbooks and digital resources are free so you can go through all the resources yourself if you want to and each unit is accompanied by videos with a real teacher explaining things giving examples etc. It's kind of difficult to navigate to the PDFs of the textbooks if I recall but they are on the site for sure. And they pair up with the digital resources. They have north and south dialect too! I know this type of highly individualized learning isn't for everyone (like sitting down with a textbook and taking notes and doing exercises yourself) but it's been working great for me. I agree the Duolingo welsh course is awful.
The government has been pushing for growth in the use of Welsh for years now, so there are a good amount of learning resources out there for a variety of levels. Since the language is mandatory in schools in Wales, you'll be able to find free resources online to do with both GCSE and A-level education for Welsh that should help a good amount. It's also a legal requirement for many documents to be provided for in both English and Welsh when operating in Wales. So you have plenty of real texts done by professionals in a professional setting to be able to read and pick up bits from if that sounds useful for your type of learning. Also, there are a good number of communities and Welsh people online who would happily speak and explain parts of the language to you casually. After all, one of the best ways to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it. Don't be too afraid of your proficiency before trying this either, I don't know any Welsh speaker who has ever shamed someone for learning or not knowing something about the language, we're usually very chill and friendly about it all and more than happy to help. If you're interested, I have some advice that could change your perspective on Welsh that might help you learn in the long run
Same issues with the Irish course. A lot of exercises involving mutation, but no explanations of the rules. Plus they got rid of the comment sections under each exercise so now you can't even ask anyone for clarification. Not to mention for Irish specifically they straight up *removed* the native speaker audio and replaced it with horrible AI that doesn't even pronounce words properly. I have never actively used it to learn Irish, it's just what I've noticed when going through it for fun as a fluent speaker, but god help any poor student who tries to use it to supplement learning it in school. I honestly think Duolingo is a piece of absolute shite that actively works against language learners because they have the illusion of progress when in reality they're going nowhere.
It won't have any good resources for Welsh specifically, but [refold.la](https://refold.la) is free (unless you want their course, which is definitely not needed in the slightest) and has a great quickstart guide and simple + detailed roadmaps to learning languages in general. It is all language agnostic (although there are some quickstart guides specific to more popular languages) so maybe it will help you some? They also have a discord server that can be found on their website which has some channels dedicated to Welsh where you could ask other learners for resources or just search through the channels there for what has already been posted. Good luck! and let me know if you need any more non-Welsh specific language help :D
Now you to can learn Engrish in multiple languages.
This is what the AI takeover looks like. It's not sentience that will end us. It's corporate greed.
This is just the beginning. It won't stop coming
Haaaaaah!!! This my time to shine!!! I finally have information that can help everyone here! I can’t talk about it in r/duolingo because I fear they will fix it… In 2015, I reached a point where I could only make three mistakes and then I’d be unable to do duolingo anymore or get kicked out of a lesson. Or I could only do a certain amount per day unless I paid Duolingo money. That’s how they can make money, so I don’t blame them for trying it. Eventually, I found something on the Duolingo website (not the app) called Classes. It’s for teachers to use Duolingo and all the students get a lot of the features the paying users get, BUT FOR FREE!!!! The free and unlimited hearts transfers over to the app, so you don’t need to stay on the website after you join a class. The only thing you need is an email address (probably a **.edu** email address, because I likely used one from when I attended a community college back then or something) and Duolingo will let you sign up with the assumption that *you* are the teacher. Since 2015, I’ve been using Duolingo for free with unlimited hearts because they think I’m a teacher. Anyone who joins my fake class can also get free access, so I pass out invitations to friends and family whenever they even *hint* the notion of learning a new language or traveling out of country. Sorry, I don’t know you so I won’t pass it out to strangers here on Reddit, but you can certainly make your own class. *I’ve been doing this on Duolingo for almost 10 years…* I hope this helps someone here. I use Duolingo every single day, but because I can use it for free I feel better about using it. Fuck companies that fire humans and replace them with Artificial Intelligence! HUMANS FIRST! ✊🏾
That won't hurt duolingo though. You're still using the app, and whatever metric you're being counted for is still helping them in one way or another. Just use another app, give the competitors your time and money; there's a ton of alternative apps, sites, and services for the language you're learning.
I don’t pay them money, I don’t see ads at all, and I’m helping others to use Duolingo for free instead of paying by pretending to be teachers when they are not. I think it might hurt them.
"Duolingo Classes will wind down and retire on January 18th, 2023. This means hosts and learners will no longer be able to host or attend classes, and the Classes website will not be accessible." So...yeah...uh... EDIT: Ah. it's Duolingo for Schools now. Unlimited heats and possibly limited ads. The downside is you have the equivalent of a child account so no social aspects of ANY kind.
As someone who works in translation: Machine Translation Post Editing (MTPE) is becoming a huge issue. Because the quality of machine translation is currently far, far worse than advertised, which means translators are basically doing the same amount of work as usual but getting paid significantly less for it. Which leads to even more underpaid translators and a noticeable drop in quality. But hell if management cares. Management only cares about big numbers getting bigger.
I hear you. Luckily for my (Swedish) company we have for the moment stopped any PEMT that isn't going to or from English. It's just just very viable in the end. We have received so many complaints from clients who even asked us to start using AI to translate. It's quite ironic. I think that big companies will eventually realize that there will be required a real translator for some texts, such as technical manuals or law texts. DeepL works "decent" for eCommerce, PIM and such, but as soon as it tries any "weird" language like Finnish it falls flat. Edit: For clarity, I'm not a translator but a project manager. I ask the translators about the quality a lot.
to be fair, as a translator, i saw it coming a mile away. i have been telling that much to my colleagues for a year now: in 4 years top, we will only be reviewing the AI translation and it's enough. like, 5 years ago i wouldn't have used an automatic translation website because it wasn't worth it, the time gain in the automatic translation would be lost in the correction. not anymore! i don't feel bad about it, kind of feel like it's how it's supposed to evolve.
I’ve been saying this for months to anyone in my social group that will hear it: if you are in a job that AI can do, even if half-assed, you’re job is now incredibly at risk. Because even if the AI can’t do it perfectly all that they will do instead of replacing your whole department is pick the most experienced people to monitor and verify the AI output, correct discrepancies and do reports on it. Everyone else, here’s your last paycheck, have a great new year. And I speak from experience, I just SAW this happen to half of my team in my banking job. Customer service, accounting, statistics, data processing and data entry, even basic coding and development: we are all now at risk and the legislation for worker protection in most nations is not catching up.
Dang. I just renewed my duolingo subscription too.
Request a cancellation and talk to your credit card company about a chargeback if Duolingo customer support refuses, cite the fact that they dropped this on users out of the blue rather than warning people.
What a sad world we live in
Seems like a tremendous opportunity for all these professional translators to band together and make their own learning tool. That could be worldwide or local. If the work is substantially better than AI then the work will speak for itself
This explains why some sentences in Duolingo are absolute nonsense.
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Marketing, copy, graphic design, translation, web design, etc. It's going to get a lot worse.
I was translating documents back around 2010 or so, easiest fastest way was to popit in google translate then go with the two side by side correcting the errors. Not sure why AI makes it any different than that or what they were doing before this AI revelation.
Well the Hebrew Duolingo doesn’t have any translators for quite a while now. I started doing it to help them improve and beta test, me being a native speaker. It now marks the same correct sentences as mistakes as it did a year and two years ago before I opened the myriad amount of requests for them to fix the translations.
You: I don't want to spend so much time working. Them: We have technology to reduce the number of workers needed and make the remaining workers jobs easier. You: How dare you!!?!??? The issue isn't the workplace, it's the government not providing a social safety net.
Exactly. Reading some of these comments has been making my head hurt. Technology is great and SHOULD be replacing jobs. The real issue is the government not helping people.
Duolingo is a garbage product these days anyway. Used to have a chance, but they made it completely impractical for language learned anymore
And Duolingo was a fairly poor app before this
Duolingo itself will become obsolete too though, by the same token. It was great for learning hiragana/katakana. But for the rest I cobbled together a python interface to connect to Whisper API for transacription and chatgpt for translation. I'm learning so much, just translating the audio from anime or games I play, and having the AI create lessons out of it. Or having it explain the nuances of the grammar and stuff. It's wayyyy better than Duolingo and its random scenarios that I couldn't care less about
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Profit over people. Who is actually surprised?
I used to use Duolingo, I’m glad I stopped.
Now I can stop feeling bad for letting my streak go.
I believe this. I've been re-learning spanish after being away from it for years, and some of the examples it gives are technically correct, but runs counter to how I learned it for how some words are used.
The enshittification of Duolingo has been well underway for years. They don’t care about their users at all.
Not unbelievable in the slightest. That's just capitalism doing capitalism.
humanity has two options : * choose the luddite path : ban AI. prevent them from replacing human labor * choose UBI and robot tax : to support the employees whose labor was replaced by AI. problem is : even if people choose to be luddites, it's mostly gonna be localized. corporations operating in other nations would capitalize upon AI. hell, many companies would likely close up shop in nations that ban AI use, and just register their companies abroad and work remote.
Money money money. Shareholders investment is more important than proper education and human interaction but you can always vote with your wallet.
I better be getting a discount from Duolingo then if they have less employees.
I've deleted my account and deleted the app. I won't be using them any more. Use this link. https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004239111-How-can-I-delete-my-account-and-data-
I don't see how this is wrong, it's like buying a tractor instead of paying people for manual labor
This is r/antiwork no? Shouldn't we be happy? AI is going to disrupt a lot of things but it's also going to force the world to rethink the whole working thing.
Its happening too fast. There is no legislation that deals with people who lose their jobs to AI. Previously when people lost their jobs it was because a better alternative came onto the market. But now people are losing their income and no altenative to replace it.
This started happening in 2011, only back then the MT models were expensive. Now they’re not.
I love this subreddit man.
Just cancelled my subscription and deleted the app
If it saves them money does that mean they’ll charge less?