The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2023 - 32

GEEKSPEAK By Jost Zetzsche
Computer Intelligence
I'm certain many of you feel very much like I do while reading the neverending
articles, social media posts, and numerous other publications about
the natural language processing tool ChatGPT, what an incredible impact
this " AI thing " is having on us, and how it will change everything!
E
very time I read another
article, my inner critic
says, " Welcome to
the world we translators
experienced at the end of
2016. "
That, of course, was
when Google switched to
neural machine translation,
followed shortly after by
Microsoft and then DeepL.
That was also when we
experienced a massive jump
in translation quality from
those engines and others
that kept popping up like
mushrooms on a rainy fall
day. What we quickly realized
(well, maybe " quickly " is
over-exaggerated) is that
these machines didn't know
what they didn't know (i.e.,
what data they were trained
with), but always confidently
" sold " us great-looking
suggestions-which either
dropped the parts that were
unfamiliar to the machine
or replaced them with
something else entirely.
Sound familiar? Does it
also sound familiar when
reading those many, many
articles about ChatGPT
that say, " It was amazing
what the tool was able to
generate in response to my
prompts. Amazing! But then
it said something that was
completely nonsense! " I
(make that " we " ) know!
FIGURE 1 When asked, ChatGPT generated a list
of publications on terminology management.
The results it produced are
shown in Figure 1.
Looks amazing, right?
You'll recognize some of
the authors, all of whom
have written something on
terminology at some point.
It even puts them in an order
of importance that seems
reasonable. But you know
what's not reasonable? None
of these publications exist.
Not one. The machine was
able to pull out good-looking
information snippets, and
it delivered them in exactly
the right kind of format. It's
just that none of it was true.
That's neural networks for
you.
ChatGPT and its
competitors use essentially
the same kind of neural
network technology as neural
machine translation. Both
the chat and translation
functions are very good
and seem smart, but it's
important to remember that
neither of them is actually
smart. In fact, " smart " is not
even on the radar of these
engines.
Any program that uses the
current kind of technology
has no understanding
of what it's doing. It's
mimicking admirably, but
it's just producing sounds-
or letters, as it were-one
in front of another, and
the machine doesn't know
what any of it means. It just
responds to prompts.
Uwe Muegge, a leader
in translation-oriented
terminology management,
asked ChatGPT to compile
a list of 10 publications on
terminology management.1
Really, what we should all
be doing right now-and
should have been doing since
ChatGPT launched late last
year-is go on speaking tours
to tell educators, writers, and
the many other creative
professionals who feel
shell-shocked not to worry.
The kind of artificial
intelligence we're dealing
with is powerful-too
powerful for its own (and
our) good sometimes, but a
potent tool nevertheless. We
know-we've been using its
cousin since 2016.
NOTES
1
Muegge, Uwe. " Did you know that #ChatGPT makes up
stuff? When I asked it to compile a list of publications on
terminology management, it mentioned one of mine. Problem
is: I never wrote that piece. " Twitter (December 26, 2022).
Jost Zetzsche is a translation industry and
translation technology consultant. He is the
author of Characters with Character: 50 Ways
to Rekindle Your Love Affair with Language.
jzetzsche@internationalwriters.com
This column has two goals: to inform the community about technological advances and encourage the use and appreciation of
technology among translation professionals.
32 The ATA Chronicle | March/April 2023
www.atanet.org

https://twitter.com/UweMuegge/status/1607460530394132480 https://twitter.com/UweMuegge/status/1607460530394132480 https://twitter.com/UweMuegge/status/1607460530394132480 https://twitter.com/UweMuegge/status/1607460530394132480 http://www.atanet.org

The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2023