this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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Fuck AI
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This right here. Whenever I've tried using an LLM to summarize, I spent more time fact-checking it (and finding the inevitable misunderstandings and outright hallucinations—they're always there for anything of substance!) than I'd spend writing my own damned summary.
There is, however, one use case I've found where LLMs work better than alternatives ... provided you do due diligence. To put it bluntly, Google Translate and its ilk of similar slop from Bing, Baidu, etc. suck. They are god-awful at translation of anything but straightforward technical writing or the most tediously dull prose. LLMs are far better translators (and can be instructed to highlight cultural artifacts, possible transcription errors, etc.) ...
... as long as you back-translate in a separate session to check for hallucination.
Oh, and Google Translate-style translators really suck at Classical Chinese. LLMs do much better (provided you do the back-translation check for hallucination).
If I understand how AI works (predictive models), kinda seems perfectly suited for translating text. Also exactly how I have been using it with Gemini, translate all the memes in ich_iel 🤣. Unironically it works really well, and the only ones that aren't understandable are cultural not linguistic.
You just have to be careful with hallucination. That backtranslation step is needed. The more alien the language is to English, the more prone to hallucination it is.
Oh that's the best part, since it's memes honestly never know if it's even meant to be completely sensible. So even if it does hallucinate, just adds a bit of spice 🤌🤌
I also like the thought that probably billions was spent to make something that is best suited for deep frying memes