The Babel Fish Are Here, But They're Not Enough
AI can translate flawlessly and write flawlessly, but what it writes is sterile.
I'm developing a serious allergy to blog posts written by ChatGPT/Claude. They are grammatically correct and well structured, but FFS, they are so predictable in the sentence formulation and rhythm. It's like listening to a Muzak rendition of Tom Waits.
I gently castigated a Greek friend for shamelessly publishing AI generated content, where the ideas are all hers but the translation to well formed English text is all down to ChatGPT. It's not that she is illiterate. She's super-bright and 100% fluent. It's just that she finds writing in her second language is a chore not a joy. She'd sooner dedicate her intellectual energy to thinking original thoughts rather than constructing appealing text.
I am certainly sympathetic to the challenges of saying anything interesting in a foreign tongue. If I get as far as 'Hello, two beers please' in any language except English I'm smug as a victorious politician on election night.
But a whole blog post crafted from raw jottings by ChatGPT feels like a depressing devaluation of the English language. One of the richest and most nuanced tools we have for expressing what we individually think and who we truly are being used to produce pages of generic AI slop.
Maybe I'm ultra sensitive because I don't have any visual imagery to augment the words, and perhaps minutes spent crafting a sentence are indeed an indulgent waste of energy.
But in the spirit of using AI to communicate I did ask Claude to translate my next email into my Greek friend's native tongue, which it claimed to have done in a couple of seconds.
Sadly on checking the output for plausibility my screen reader only said 'email AI blog'. Unsurprisingly that is not my original text and isn't even Greek anyway. So WTF is going on?
After 10 minutes of scratching my head, re-trying, reformatting my input and then trying ChatGPT, which produced identical output, I went for a coffee and activated my own personal deep think model. If you've cracked my little conundrum, but have just had your job stolen by AI, then maybe now's the time to apply to GCHQ for a new career – they do love a good puzzler.
Here's a clue: Unlike ChatGPT my screen reader doesn't speak Greek. More egregiously it doesn't even say gobbly gobbly blah diddy blah blah, it just silently swallows every character from the Greek alphabet. That turns out to be the entire contents of my translated email except for the three untranslatable words: email, AI and blog. So that is what I heard 'email AI blog'.
ChatGPT and Claude had indeed both produced flawless Greek almost as quickly as a Babel fish.
If you're not familiar with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy then:
- Honestly, you really, really ought to read it – one of the funniest books ever written
- In the meantime, just know that a Babel Fish stuck in your ear can simultaneously translate any alien language into your own mother tongue.
So if you're thinking of a career as a simultaneous translator, best think again. And if you're thinking of a career as a blogger, but are unable or unwilling to write engaging English, then maybe wait for the Babel Fish 2.0, which doesn't just write English for you, but writes it in your own unique and engaging style, thus avoiding allergic reaction or suicidal defenestration by your less tolerant readers.