back to article Google Translate spews doomsday messages, Facebook snatches boffins, and more in AI

Hello, welcome to this week's roundup in AI. The machines have been sending us spooky messages on Google Translate, Facebook is hiring more academics to start new labs and some prat decided to step on a self-driving car in California. AI sends us secret apocalyptic messages: What’s that Google? Jesus is going to return when …

  1. msknight

    What I want to know is...

    Who types in "dog" 18 times to Google translate, and sets it to translate from Yoruba to English.

    And what happened when they typed it in 17 times?

    1. pɹɐʍoɔ snoɯʎuouɐ

      Re: What I want to know is...

      its a slightly difrent message.... you get different messages for 16, 17 AND 18

      1. Come to the Dark Side

        Re: What I want to know is...

        I'd thought it may be something like an assumed auto-correct where if the entered text doesn't make sense in it's current configuration, it does some distance-matching and checks highly scoring alternatives. But the response for entering dog only 6 times is "dog dog dog - reader email"...

    2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: What I want to know is...

      Who types in "dog" 18 times to Google translate, and sets it to translate from Yoruba to English

      Either the much-rumored Internet Dog who no-one knows who he is -- or a "person" from the Twitterverse.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What I want to know is...

        The same people who used the password "dog" and "dogdog" and "dogdogdog" in each of the leaked password lists. Yes. They are very much popular passwords to.

    3. Mark 85

      Re: What I want to know is...

      Who types in "dog" 18 times to Google translate, and sets it to translate from Yoruba to English.

      Someone with entirely too much time on their hands? Or was maybe told by a boss who's tad bit off his rocker?

    4. Martin Summers Silver badge

      Re: What I want to know is...

      Google AI has worked out that dogs created the earth hence the anagram for God. God is actually a Border Collie hence the 'Lord is my Shepherd' stuff.

    5. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: Who types in "dog" 18 times to Google translate

      Someone with dogged determination.

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What I want to know is...

      It is a shorter version of the full 18 character translation. Starts at 16 dog, then gets longer till you reach 18 dog.

      I tried it on other languages. There are about 6 of them that do the same translation other than Yoruba. One translates it as: dog cat dog cat dog cat...

      A few give a weird: However, however, however, however, however, though, though, however, though died though, however, though died died

    7. Zanin Neko
      Boffin

      Re: What I want to know is...

      It is a shorter version of the full 18 character translation. Starts at 16 dog, then gets longer till you reach 18 dog.

      I tried it on other languages. There are about 6 of them that have the same exact translation as Yoruba. One translates it as: dog cat dog cat dog cat...

      A few give a weird: However, however, however, however, however, though, though, however, though died though, however, though died died.

      I am sure if you choose to "correct" the translation enough times, you can get that translation to show up for everyone, regardless of how silly it is.

    8. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What I want to know is...

      Someone who enjoys dogging?

  2. Notas Badoff

    They can out thunk us

    You mean gTranslate has gotten better then?

    I've mentioned before that you can get from 'fragrant' (as in Hong Kong) to "sweet-smelting". I hadn't yet found that gTranslate can't figure out the difference between 'flying' and 'flat'.

    Type in 'airplane' to get '飞机' in Chinese, then reverse that to get "open country". Oops.

    That's what happens when your neural net gets lost in the outback.

    1. Waseem Alkurdi

      Re: They can out thunk us

      I don't speak Hong Kong-ese*, but does there happen to be any etymological relationship between the two words being mixed up? Dunno, but there seems to be a possibility that "airplanes" fly in "open country" (air?) and that may turn up some relationship?

      * I believe they speak Chinese, but I'm not sure if it's the same Chinese as China, you know, you have Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese ...

    2. _LC_

      Re: They can out thunk us

      Chinese characters and short character combinations usually come with a multitude of meanings. For example, the character 那 has 8 different readings and as a result different meanings.

      Therefore, without context you cannot simply 'translate them back'.

    3. Konk

      Re: They can out thunk us

      I agree with the poster above, Chinese characters can have very different meanings depending on the context.

      A good is example is 香, it generally means "smells good" but also means "insence" so actually 香港 is somewhat ambiguous as to if it smells good, smells of incense or both.

      It looks like 飛機 has been fixed now.

  3. Waseem Alkurdi

    Google overhauled its online translation services using a giant neural machine translation model, an AI system that uses natural language processing to encode and decode words in different languages.

    Many would be like, "oh, really?".

    But rest assured, Google's AI is really great so far.

    Arabic is one language that used to be really butchered in Google Translate (with a fair share of memes about it!)

    But recently, Google Translate has really, really improved the experience. Not totally perfect, but a huge leap.

    Another thing is YouTube's auto-gen Closed Captions. In the past, they used to be really terrible; nowadays, they're pretty reliable*! It even recognizes and "fixes" weird accents (when the speaker doesn't have a US or UK accent, trying to sort out things is a royal piece of crap!)

    * English subs; YMMV for other languages.

  4. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Trollface

    Judging by some of the machine translations, it highly possible the model was fed passages from bibles and similar material.

    It also appears that Jeff Vandermeer is on the team.

    In any case, it appears Google has adjusted its translation code to stop it spewing any obvious creepy portents – for now.

    Are these also the guys who will burn "racism" out of the neural networks so that we can have equitable outcomes?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Satire?

      I was not sure if the reference to diagrams of "dark circles" and "white circles" in a paper about discrimination, was satire or real.

      I don't know how a Google AI works. But I think mine just segfualted from that link.

      [edit] And then rebooted and read the rest of it. The maths and interaction is really helpful. Shows there is no easy answer. And you cannot ever have a perfect answer if also taking some aspects into consideration. We have to give up something. And what to give up is contested. I know I would be happy giving up money to keep things fair. But others may wish to keep their money, and see that as more fair than how they should be treating others.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I think some of these are easter eggs put in by the developers.

    There's another one, if you type in the allegedly gernan version of Monty Pythons funniest joke in the world and ask it to translate from German to English, it comes back "Fatal Error". As per the sketch when anyone who gets the joke dies from laughter.

    1. VinceH

      "I think some of these are easter eggs put in by the developers."

      ^This. Possibly - and also possibly a buggy lookup related to it.

      Also, upon reading this article and the first few comments (16, 17, 18 x dog) I went from one to I don't know how many. The first few just repeated the text to translate. Four dogs became three, and a few beyond that it began appending "reader email". Up in the twenties, it was variously inserting "krist" or "christian" in the translation. Beyond that it became more random, but repeating some of the earlier ones - for example at one point it showed the word dog n times followed by the 16 translation.

      So I suspect, as AC said, an Easter egg, whereby the developer(s) responsible have triggered a lookup at certain points, and in some cases it's getting the count wrong, reading a pointer from the wrong place as a result and reading/adding these other words/terms.

  6. Warm Braw

    Clearly, the output of Google Translate shouldn't be taken as gospel.

  7. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Trump

    Type that in and select Russian, and look at the varieties that come up...

    This is one of the variations to appear:-

    славный малый

    good fellow, good sort, nice chap, sport, trump

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

  9. Mage Silver badge

    Google Translate?

    If that's AI, then AI is a total failure. It's pretty garbage. This week insisting (in the translation) that I was typing 'bar' in the English phrase when I was typing barge.

    Is the human correction suggestion (crowd sourced translation) curated?

    My understanding is that it's less complex than translation 20 years ago, simply being based on Google taking copies of documents (starting with EU) and then books that are assumed to be the same thing in a different language.

    It's more bother, but I'm finding a good bilingual dictionary and grammar works better. I think it's got worse.

    I started to learn programming due to an interest in AI. I've come to the conclusion that now we just have hype and marketing buzzwords and also sometimes fraud. Note "pattern matching" based on human curated inputs to so called "Deep Learning" or so called "Neural networks" is "JUST" pattern matching, not image recognition or AI.

    Look at the success of UK police so called "Facial recognition": 2%!

  10. Dan 55 Silver badge

    DeepL

    Seems to come up with more sensible translations, however it's only for some European languages.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Simple?

    " it highly possible the model was fed passages from bibles and similar material."

    The phrase is not lifted from a "bible", as it's too modern in references (doomsday clock an invention from 1947). But possibly other fiction/opinion writing off Google books? Else just off webpages/Youtube captions... In fact, based on they prose and type of content in the above picture from the article, I'd say it was from a Youtube video!

    Actually, that makes sense. So, in pseudo[drunk](armchair) code: Auto transcription;thislanguage ++ crowdsourced transcription /*Either cachpa or community supplied*/ [YoutubeVideo]: Compare to -[sameVideo;otherlanguage]

    > Returns "Garbage"

    (I really don't know how to code! XD )

    1. GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

      Re: Simple?

      Yeah, it's not biblical sources per se, for instance, if you select Maori, and type:

      "prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy prophecy p"

      The lone 'p' is vital, it returns:

      "Prophecy: Prophecy: You country you are living on borrowed time Reader Mail / prophecy of David Eckefjord"

      I did find a real person by that name, but couldn't find the quote attributed to them. As that last word is completed letter by letter, the translation changes, attributing the quote then to 'Läs allt!' Which (if I can trust Google Translate on this one 'Read all'. Interestingly, at 7x prophecy, the return is "

      Prophecy: Aftonbladet" which is a news web site, and the phrase 'Las allt' is used there.

      So it looks like Google Translate has scraped some web sites for content?

      Although 15 x prophecy returns "Prophecy: Prophecy: ICE mass murdering people in the name of Islam" and I can't find that exact quote anywhere, apart from a Reddit article, discussing this mis-translation. I'm guessing someone read my post here about that one, and shared it over at Reddit.

  12. SVV

    Everyone laughed at 2001 : A Space Oddesey

    "Google gives you this back: “Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return.”

    Surely we'd never be so stupid to let that sort of HAL thing happen. So, now we have Google dominating tech, Trump as the world's most powerful leader, wildly cheered on by "end times" believing christian fundamentalists and idiotic general public belief in the "power of the AI future" due to hype generated by chancers, and there's no chance that this is just a mildly comical abberation caused by overenthusiasm for wishful thinking and egotists drunk on their own brilliance that is not going to fuck things up terminally in the most tawdry, shit manner imaginable.

  13. Petey

    Facebook and Robotics

    This sounds a bit like Facebook attempting to get ahead of the curve and mimicking Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back". It wouldn't be a surprise if they decided to offer personalities in robots for times when Mum or Dad is away, for example, temporarily or otherwise.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    dog 18 times

    Google's AI know something BAD is about to happen and is trying to tell us to watch out!

  15. Gannon (J.) Dick

    The right to be forgotten

    " The machines have been sending us spooky messages on Google Translate, ..."

    I'm not surprised Google Translate is spewing doomsday messages.

    I am curious as to why Google keeps behaving like they do having read them ... wait ... they read mine AND theirs, right ?

    Dear Google,

    Judgement Day has come and the EU is waiting for the money transfer. They will not wait forever.

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