100% agree with you there, it's often a facade intended to be useless, so of course it doesn't solve your problem!
And yeah it's really frustrating when businesses are disingenuous, totally agree.
software-related AI Video has arrived - It looks incredible
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100% agree with you there, it's often a facade intended to be useless, so of course it doesn't solve your problem!
And yeah it's really frustrating when businesses are disingenuous, totally agree.
And yet, as Mara points out, "AI" is incredibly bad at giving us solutions to real problems - the kind caused by irrational humans doing stuff that wasn't built into the taught responses. If it draws a picture of a pitbull in a suit, chances are it's plagiarising an image from an 1840s Punch cartoon. In any case, these aren't problems in need of solutions, they're amusing challenges that may or may not eventually be put to good use in some other context - which is what we humans have been doing since the first Neanderthal picked up a stick and poked something with it.
I'd hazard a guess that most of here have already seen "radical, unprecedented change" in our lifetimes. I learnt to type on an old manual typewriter weighing about 10kg and where every letter had to be battered out individually onto a sheet of actual paper before it could be shared with anyone else; now I have a device that fits in my pocket, can guess what my next word will be and send my composition to a million people in a fraction of a second. But it's still damnably difficult to find any computer-assisted problem solver that can look at a mess and say "ah, I see what you did there ..."
Having a universal translator on your phone is "incredibly bad" eh
It's so funny you say AI is incredibly bad, i think its incredibly amazing.
I use photoshop now, I just click and objects disappear, i just drag and suddenly my whole scene expands with generative fill
But to you thats all incredibly bad. man we live in different worlds.
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Yeah ... except that's not what I said. Read it again:
Maybe it is because we live in different worlds that I'm not amazed by a piece of technology doing ... well, nothing special. It's not fixing a problem and it's not doing anything new. In my world, it's perfectly normal for people from different countries to speak different languages; and in my social (and working) life, it's perfectly normal for those people to turn up in the same place and find ways of communicating with each other.
Waaaaaaaay back in the last century we had the Collins Gem dictionaries to help us out when faced with any apparent obstacle to communication; in more recent times we've had Google Translate. Now we may or may not have this GPT tool, but forgive me if I hold off on the amazement until I see it work in the real world, not in a staged promotional video. I think it highlights how useless the platform is in it's current state that you have to post the same clip twice!
I'll tell you what I do find amazing, though: real humans doing simultaneous translations in chaotic environments - treat yourself to a visit to the European Parliament building some day (the parliament chamber in Strasbourg is quite mind-blowing - almost like a real world version of the Star Wars senate chamber, but the pods are for the interpreters). And even better are the humans who can "translate" something in a creative - but entirely appropriate - way.
One real-world example, from the festival at which I work in July, was our public announcer a few years ago: the (native) French version was something along the lines of "Attention, Mesdames et Messieurs. Would the owner of the white Renault, registration XX-60000-YY, please move it immediately as it's blocking the disabled access" Then he switched to English and gave his message as "Ladies and Gentlemen, I don't need to translate the previous message into English because I know that no English person would be so inconsiderate as to park their white Renault in front of the disabled access. I hope the arrogant French person responsible will move it immediately"
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Thats absolutely a real problem.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? A planet of 8 billion people and you can't imagine a scenario where people speaking different languages would want a free app to translate to each other?
I had a girlfriend that was indian and her grandmother had dementia and required full time care but they couldnt find anyone that could ever help out because no one local for hire could speak punjabi/communicate with the grandma (given the salary they were able to offer). if something like this existed while her grandmother was still alive, they would have been able to hire someone to help, use the translator, and it would have eased an enormous burden off her family.
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Nope, not being obtuse, and I don't need to imagine any such scenario because it happens all the time in my daily/weekly life - at work and at play. And that's been the case for the last twenty years.
Would a free app be of help? Well, yeah, of course. But guess what: we've had that kind of free app available in one form or another for the last twenty years. I have literally been at the bedside of someone using one in a hospital to communicate with the doctors treating his workplace injury. Years ago.
The scenario you described is exactly why AI will never deliver on its promise - because the situation (any real life situation) is too complex. Picking it apart, the real problems were:
- the grandmother had dementia, which makes communication in any language a problem; AI can't solve that.
- the family appears to have (had) financial difficulties; AI wouldn't make them go away.
- the family chose to live in a country with one of the worst public health care services; AI definitely won't fix that.
- despite there being several hundreds of thousands of Punjabi speakers in the US, none of them were apparently able/willing to assist in this situation; AI wouldn't be correct that lack of community spirit.
- there were free translation tools available (unless this was more than 20 years ago) but for some reason, no-one used them; so why would they be any more likely to use an AI tool?
A tech bro staging an interview and to show how his app can make jokes about whales and linear equations doesn't mean it's going to revolutionise human-to-human communication, assuming it can cope with real world factors like background noise, strong regional accents, slang, pidgin languages, two or three people speaking at the same time, comprenhension difficulties on the part of the listener, etc. So far, all we've seen is a marketing gimmick; and for now, all we can say is that it might be a very, very, very small improvement on Google Translate. What's there to be impressed about?
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