Category: AI

AI Translate

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

The advancement of AI in translation tools makes my blogging more difficult. I get strange results when trying to find a word and get a clear reminder that I should not overly rely on this tech.

The Bulgarian word for “Cleaver” is translated as “Satyr” because of the proximity in letters. The Bulgarian word for “Wild Plums” is translated as “Junkies”. The Lungwort plant is translated as lungs recurringly over a variety of tools.

I tried ChatGPT and it’s better but still fails, and you can’t really trust a tool that fails for unknown words without checking elsewhere.

Bing Translate can do formal or informal translations but both are questionable. The 3 words above produced 4 different mistakes and 0 correct hits.

I’m switching back to using a dictionary for now. The type of assistance I need is not served well by AI-based translation tools. Convenience-wise, they’re super quick and convenient but not accurate yet.

All Systems Red

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

A wonderful novella by Martha Wells, beautifully published by Artline Studios. The book is tiny and is a quick read. It’s about a very human murder bot whose job is to protect a group of planetary explorers. I’ll probably wait for the translations because the hardcover is so pretty.

The suggestion for this book came from a fellow blogger and friend @dni.

5/5, and the best book I read this month so far.

Cory Doctorow on AI

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

Spicy autocomplete absolutely can’t replace journalists.

— Cory Doctorow on AI

There’s something very deep in our response to righteous anger. Spicy autocomplete. Righteous anger, followed by italic uncertainty. Dehumanizing the AI so that we’re ready for eradication. At the same time, AI is already replacing human content creators – journalists, bloggers, illustrators, troll farms, SEO experts, photographers, data labelers, etc.

Generative AI is not necessarily terrible. ChatGPT can be forced to link to the source of each of its statements and will become like a search engine. Websites can flag human-created content with a badge of honor. The chatbots could be used where human support was previously impossible, increasing the need for more specialized human support and sales.

The society managed to navigate harmful technological advances in the past. Open Source happened. I don’t quite see how we’ll push back against some of the negative uses of AI like deepfakes but we’ll have to figure it out.

My post from 2023 on content aggregation is still relevant.

Bad Grammar Can Be a Feature

~ Veselin ~ 29 Comments

Engines love to consume lengthy content and rank it higher on search. ChatGPT can generate tons of additional meaningful text for the idea. However, as a reader, I prefer to read content written by humans and for humans. I’d rather read meaningful ideas in ugly sentences with simple words and poor grammar than AI-assisted beautiful novellas with a summary and headlines.

In that context, bad grammar, slang, lower-case text, and such can be a form of anti-language that identifies the post as human-written and non-AI-augmented. It can be a feature, not a bug (now I have an excuse to turn off Grammarly lol).

Avogadro Corp by William Hertling book review

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I’m interested in using AI to optimize things and got the nudge to read this book because of my interests. I find this book quite depressing.

A team of engineers in the Google-sized company Avogadro Corp implements a software called ELOPe. It optimizes emails based on the desired outcome. ELOPe has access to everyone’s main communication channel, which gives it instant and infinite power. It quickly takes over the company by sending bogus emails. The software is good enough to self-improve, manipulate, and survive.

Although very unrealistic from an engineering point of view, the book is a good warning of what could happen one day if AI is trusted. I find Skynet or the Matrix more likely scenarios than this but it should be kept in mind that although it may not play out this way, we can achieve the result in some other way.

4/5 – it’s a good warning, and a great idea, but unpleasant to read due to its unrealistic characters. I’m not sure if I’ll dare to touch the follow-ups.