alt Hacker NewsI miss the old Google Translate. I use it for learning languages (translating little snippets, lyrics etc.) and these days it "interprets" way too much, confabulating like an LLM and inserting stuff that's way beyond what's in the text. I have to remove words and rewrite and look for other sources to be sure it's actually translating what I'm inputting and not something it just made up to make it sound good.
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This rings really true for me as well. I really dislike AI as a solution to problems that have a better solution already in place.
Translation and search for facts are both good examples - since AI isn't completely reliable, even if the fact or translation gets surfaced quicker, I then have to then spend more time verifying it through a second source which completely defeats the point.
A couple years ago, if I searched "are Oak trees native to Spain" I would have probably got a text quote from a website at the top of google search results, and I could be 100% sure that text was on the website. Now, instead there's an AI summary with citations that may, or maybe not, contain citation for what it's telling me.
There's obviously good use cases of AI, but I'm surprised by how many bad use cases are being shoveled out on the regular.
If you manually select the language instead of using the "Detect language" thing, you can use the old google translate model by clicking on "advanced" at the bottom
I've always wished Translate would have a 'literal' mode, which I find far more helpful to learn roots and such.
Just an example, consider Ausland and it's various suffixes to mean abroad, foreign, etc. Which are fair translations. But it's more helpful to me if it were translated more literally to something like "out (of) country", as it helps understand the parts of the word rather than the whole.