Take Me to Your Manager

Sometimes I wonder how much of the apparent progress of AI is an illusion conjured by human regression. I've talked before about some of the inaccurate or oddly subjective responses I've gotten from Google's AI, such as misattributing the source of a John Milton quote or supplying oddly diplomatic opinions in place of factual responses. How often are such things taken as accurate responses by people who obviously don't know any different since they were googling the question in the first place? Is quality control even possible, since it would likely mean someone whose breadth of knowledge is comparable to a computer database?

I noticed recently that Google Translate isn't as good as it used to be. Google used to be better at translating English to Japanese than it was at translating Japanese to English since Japanese relies more on context. Yesterday I was checking the translation for a word for alien in Japanese, "宇宙人", which I've always heard pronounced as "uchuujin." But Google now insists it's pronounced "uchuubito". Except when I hit the "sound" option, in which case the AI voice pronounces it as "uchuujin". I'm guessing the sound option is still drawing from an old AI framework while the text is drawing from a new one.

Google's own AI overview in its search function apparently also disagrees with its choice of pronunciation.

When you try to translate "alien" from English to Japanese, the first option you get is just the English word "alien" written in Japanese characters, which seems suspiciously lazy.

Hopefully this won't impact interstellar diplomacy.