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627 points cratermoon | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.412s | source
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gyomu ◴[] No.44461457[source]
Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there.

But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline.

> There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though.

> I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

But up until now, you had no choice and to keep making crappy pictures and playing crappy songs until you actually start to develop a taste for the effort, and a few years later you find yourself actually pretty darn competent at the thing. That's a pretty virtuous cycle.

I shudder to think where we'll be if the corporate-media machine keeps hammering the message "you don't have to bother learning how to draw, drawing is hard, just get ChatGPT to draw pictures for you" to young people for years to come.

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autumnstwilight ◴[] No.44461825[source]
I learned Japanese by painstakingly translating interviews and blog posts from my favorite artist 15+ years ago, dictionary in hand. I also live and work in Japan now. Today I can click a button under the artist's tweets and get an instant translation that looks coherent (and often is, though it can also be quite wrong maybe 1/10 times).

In terms of the artist being accessible to overseas fans it's a great improvement, but I do wonder if I had grown up with this, would I have had any motivation to learn?

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1. johnnyanmac ◴[] No.44498579[source]
I'd say a 10% error rate is quite drastic for spoken communication. Can you imagine if you lost 10% of the context for the comments here on HN?

I don't know, I feel like one of the worst things to do on the internet is to miscommunicate. And that can be hard enough with 2 native speakers (I just had a response completly blow up on me because they assumedly took my comment the wrong way).

>but I do wonder if I had grown up with this, would I have had any motivation to learn?

Machine translation has come a long way where I can at least get the general feel of say, a translated article. It is still far from the point where I feel like I can read a machine translated article and not have it come off as clunky. That last 10% or so is just uncanny enough for it to impact my reading experience.

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2. autumnstwilight ◴[] No.44516878[source]
As a fan who can read both languages, the ~10% error rate does concern me, since it's coherent-looking enough that many fans don't seem to seek out or share fan translations anymore, but still has a definite potential to blow up in a misunderstanding. However, there's not much I can do about it.