A study has shown AI consistently misclassifies non-native English writing. It could make the current media bias against second-language English speakers even worse.
The recent AI hype is utter nonsense. And it won't be the last time. This laughable uninformed hype and airhead, unscientific fear will be cropping up every other year from now on. The way to avoid the nonsense is the usual recommendation: don't listen to motor-mouth Americans with annoying nasal accents and worthless rubbish they are trying to sell.
It is true that lots of journalists will be thrown out of work (are there any non-avatars left anyway!?) because "AI" is good at doing what the majority have always done: churn out torrents of inaccurate verbiage. I don't think I really care that much: thick, gullible, unintelligent people want to imbibe crap and will continue to do so. It's a golden age for them. Nothing can change that.
"AI" is a hype-in-an-acronym. There is no "intelligence" of any kind there: all of it, without any exception, in 2023, is "SP", Statistical Processing. This is not unimpressive (Google Translate, for example), and it can be expected that in a few years there will be some autonomous vehicles, able to handle certain situations. It will be at least 30 years before you can legally use one to go to a country pub and come back having drunk alcohol. "Intelligence" will never result from SP. Artificial Intelligence will result only from the IT field of Artificial Life and "emergent systems". It's decades and decades away.
I don't really see this specific concern about newsreaders who for some unaccountable reason want to be "anchors" in a country where they are not a native speaker. Being an anchor is showbiz. Many are called, few are chosen. Much more importantly, to my way of thinking, there are hundreds and hundreds of minority languages which are under huge threat from English, on all fronts. English is the language of the Internet, the language of the EU, the "common" lingua franca of the most populous country on Earth (India) and of the most powerful one. This pressure to learn and speak in English can only get worse, and then much worse.
Jul 17, 2023·edited Jul 17, 2023Liked by Barbara Serra
Barbara, your article has made me think, as all your articles do, even though I don't always agree with everything you write. So thank you, for yet another thought-provoking and eloquent piece of writing.
Before I read your article, my thoughts about AI detectors were as follows. They obviously have problems, but they're even new technology than the AI bots themselves, and can therefore be expected to have some catching up to do. I think back to the mid 1990s, when the World Wide Web was jokingly referred to as the "World-wide wait", but people could see its potential, even if they were waiting 10 seconds or more for every web page they visited to appear. AI detectors are in their infancy; and at some point in the future, they'll be more accurate than they are now, and less biased against the writings of non-native speakers.
But having read and thought about your article, I now believe this view is wrong. There will be an ongoing "arms race" between the creators of the bots and the creators of the detectors. The bot creators want to make bots whose writing is harder and harder to distinguish from human writing. The detector creators want to stymie the efforts of the bot creators. But the detector creators will always be behind the 8-ball, and will never achieve the accuracy we'd like them to. And as you point out, they will likely focus their efforts on "native writing". That means they'll always produce a product which can identify the writing of a native speaker more accurately than it can identify the writing of a non-native speaker. I don't know the answer to this problem, but I'm glad you've highlighted it.
As for the second half of your article, I have less to agree with.
Let's replace the wonderful Ms Chan with a journalist from Palestine who speaks only Arabic and Hebrew. Perhaps that journalist wishes to tell the world about the oppression that her people are suffering at the hands of the occupying power. Until recently, only the Arabic and Hebrew speaking world had access to her content. But the same technology that produced the artificially Hispanophone Melissa allows our hypothetical (but certainly oh so real) Palestinian journalist a much wider audience. If she can translate not only her message, but also her delivery, mannerisms and so on to English, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, and a bunch of other popular languages and cultures; then maybe the world will sit up and take notice.
Or consider maybe a man from some African country, who wants to tell the world what's going on around him, but speaks only Swahili and a few words of broken French. I want to listen to that man. I want him to appear on my screen, animatedly gesticulating, explaining in crystal clear English about the political and economic situation in his country, and how it impacts the daily life of the common people. Isn't this what international journalism is supposed to be all about?
Suddenly, new scripts don't have to be written by fluent English speakers, to be accessible to the Anglophone world - to sad, ignorant monoglots like me and so many others. Once the technology is sufficiently advanced, the narrative will literally be the thoughts of the original journalist, unencumbered by Anglophone prejudice or frames of reference. Of course, news from English speaking countries will still have English or American cultural nuances, no matter what language it's translated into; but so much "international news" happens elsewhere that we shouldn't turn our backs on.
I started watching Al-Jazeera English many years ago, for one reason only. Al-Jazeera English simply doesn't have the pro-Western bias of the news networks of New Zealand, Australia, USA and the UK. It was so refreshing to be reminded that the world doesn't revolve around USA, and important events actually happen in parts of the world where not everyone is Anglophone and pro-American. (Getting to see the inimitably lovely Ms Serra in action was a secondary reason to watch). Surely, the new technology can only make it easier for the rest of the world to remind me, and others like me, of its importance and even its very existence.
Really thoughtful post, as usual, Barbara. As a native Spanish speaker (who could probably argue he’s also a native English speaker), the dubbing of Melissa’s report was pretty stunning. It’s still a bit robotic, it could never match the lips of the reader, and the one gesture Melissa made didn’t feel connected to the Spanish words.
I’d love to see a longer clip, especially one where the anchor had a story that required more emotional variety (as opposed to a story that was just serious). Can the technology adjust to vocal changes and the emotional transitions in an anchor’s face and delivery? Also, Spanish texts are usually at least 20% longer than their English equivalents (although Spanish is generally spoken faster). Can the technology adjust its speed? If not, in this example, Melissa could have finished her reading while her Spanish clone was still talking.
The recent AI hype is utter nonsense. And it won't be the last time. This laughable uninformed hype and airhead, unscientific fear will be cropping up every other year from now on. The way to avoid the nonsense is the usual recommendation: don't listen to motor-mouth Americans with annoying nasal accents and worthless rubbish they are trying to sell.
It is true that lots of journalists will be thrown out of work (are there any non-avatars left anyway!?) because "AI" is good at doing what the majority have always done: churn out torrents of inaccurate verbiage. I don't think I really care that much: thick, gullible, unintelligent people want to imbibe crap and will continue to do so. It's a golden age for them. Nothing can change that.
"AI" is a hype-in-an-acronym. There is no "intelligence" of any kind there: all of it, without any exception, in 2023, is "SP", Statistical Processing. This is not unimpressive (Google Translate, for example), and it can be expected that in a few years there will be some autonomous vehicles, able to handle certain situations. It will be at least 30 years before you can legally use one to go to a country pub and come back having drunk alcohol. "Intelligence" will never result from SP. Artificial Intelligence will result only from the IT field of Artificial Life and "emergent systems". It's decades and decades away.
I don't really see this specific concern about newsreaders who for some unaccountable reason want to be "anchors" in a country where they are not a native speaker. Being an anchor is showbiz. Many are called, few are chosen. Much more importantly, to my way of thinking, there are hundreds and hundreds of minority languages which are under huge threat from English, on all fronts. English is the language of the Internet, the language of the EU, the "common" lingua franca of the most populous country on Earth (India) and of the most powerful one. This pressure to learn and speak in English can only get worse, and then much worse.
Barbara, your article has made me think, as all your articles do, even though I don't always agree with everything you write. So thank you, for yet another thought-provoking and eloquent piece of writing.
Before I read your article, my thoughts about AI detectors were as follows. They obviously have problems, but they're even new technology than the AI bots themselves, and can therefore be expected to have some catching up to do. I think back to the mid 1990s, when the World Wide Web was jokingly referred to as the "World-wide wait", but people could see its potential, even if they were waiting 10 seconds or more for every web page they visited to appear. AI detectors are in their infancy; and at some point in the future, they'll be more accurate than they are now, and less biased against the writings of non-native speakers.
But having read and thought about your article, I now believe this view is wrong. There will be an ongoing "arms race" between the creators of the bots and the creators of the detectors. The bot creators want to make bots whose writing is harder and harder to distinguish from human writing. The detector creators want to stymie the efforts of the bot creators. But the detector creators will always be behind the 8-ball, and will never achieve the accuracy we'd like them to. And as you point out, they will likely focus their efforts on "native writing". That means they'll always produce a product which can identify the writing of a native speaker more accurately than it can identify the writing of a non-native speaker. I don't know the answer to this problem, but I'm glad you've highlighted it.
As for the second half of your article, I have less to agree with.
Let's replace the wonderful Ms Chan with a journalist from Palestine who speaks only Arabic and Hebrew. Perhaps that journalist wishes to tell the world about the oppression that her people are suffering at the hands of the occupying power. Until recently, only the Arabic and Hebrew speaking world had access to her content. But the same technology that produced the artificially Hispanophone Melissa allows our hypothetical (but certainly oh so real) Palestinian journalist a much wider audience. If she can translate not only her message, but also her delivery, mannerisms and so on to English, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, and a bunch of other popular languages and cultures; then maybe the world will sit up and take notice.
Or consider maybe a man from some African country, who wants to tell the world what's going on around him, but speaks only Swahili and a few words of broken French. I want to listen to that man. I want him to appear on my screen, animatedly gesticulating, explaining in crystal clear English about the political and economic situation in his country, and how it impacts the daily life of the common people. Isn't this what international journalism is supposed to be all about?
Suddenly, new scripts don't have to be written by fluent English speakers, to be accessible to the Anglophone world - to sad, ignorant monoglots like me and so many others. Once the technology is sufficiently advanced, the narrative will literally be the thoughts of the original journalist, unencumbered by Anglophone prejudice or frames of reference. Of course, news from English speaking countries will still have English or American cultural nuances, no matter what language it's translated into; but so much "international news" happens elsewhere that we shouldn't turn our backs on.
I started watching Al-Jazeera English many years ago, for one reason only. Al-Jazeera English simply doesn't have the pro-Western bias of the news networks of New Zealand, Australia, USA and the UK. It was so refreshing to be reminded that the world doesn't revolve around USA, and important events actually happen in parts of the world where not everyone is Anglophone and pro-American. (Getting to see the inimitably lovely Ms Serra in action was a secondary reason to watch). Surely, the new technology can only make it easier for the rest of the world to remind me, and others like me, of its importance and even its very existence.
Really thoughtful post, as usual, Barbara. As a native Spanish speaker (who could probably argue he’s also a native English speaker), the dubbing of Melissa’s report was pretty stunning. It’s still a bit robotic, it could never match the lips of the reader, and the one gesture Melissa made didn’t feel connected to the Spanish words.
I’d love to see a longer clip, especially one where the anchor had a story that required more emotional variety (as opposed to a story that was just serious). Can the technology adjust to vocal changes and the emotional transitions in an anchor’s face and delivery? Also, Spanish texts are usually at least 20% longer than their English equivalents (although Spanish is generally spoken faster). Can the technology adjust its speed? If not, in this example, Melissa could have finished her reading while her Spanish clone was still talking.
Love your posts! Completely agree Culture, and language, is thicker than water. And AI doesn't know all languages equally well