“The vast majority of these will look like human language, and when you give it a new one it is trained to produce something, at all costs, that also looks like human language. “The models are black-boxes, that are learned from as many training instances that you can find,” Rush said.
But when it’s fed nonsense inputs, Rush said, the system can “hallucinate” bizarre outputs-not unlike the way Google’s DeepDream identifies and accentuates patterns in images. In neural machine translation, the system is trained with large numbers of texts in one language and corresponding translations in another, to create a model for moving between the two. It’s more likely, Rush said, that the strange translations are related to a change Google Translate made several years ago, when it started using a technique known as “neural machine translation.”
It’s possible that the sinister messages are the result of disgruntled Google employees, for instance, or that mischievous users are abusing the “Suggest an edit” button, which accepts suggestions for better translations of a given text.Īlexander Rush, an assistant professor at Harvard who studies natural language processing and computer translation, said that internal quality filters would probably catch that type of manipulation, however. There are several possible explanations for the strange outputs. When Motherboard provided Google with an example of the eerie messages, its translation disappeared from Google Translate. “This is simply a function of inputting nonsense into the system, to which nonsense is generated.”
“Google Translate learns from examples of translations on the web and does not use ‘private messages’ to carry out translations, nor would the system even have access to that content,” said Justin Burr, a Google spokesperson, in an email. Users on a subreddit called TranslateGate have speculated that some of the strange outputs might be drawn from text gathered from emails or private messages. On Twitter, people have blamed the strange translations on ghosts and demons.
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