Google humor video

[Tom Gally]

On a lighter note, Google Japan posted the following October Fool’s (?) joke a few days ago:

https://landing.google.co.jp/caps/

The video is full of silly puns in Japanese. As I watched it, I thought how hard it would be to translate those puns into English. But then I switched on the English subtitles and saw that the translator did a very good job with them:

https://youtu.be/6vib77CUxNM?si=HNHCfYLSp2iRIEkD

At 1:23, for example:

ウェアラブルなおかげでキーボードの中でのおしゃれ度は頭一つ抜けてますね。

The fact that it’s wearable makes it head and shoulders above the rest.

On a darker note, GPT-4 can also translate puns:

https://gally.net//temp/20231006gptpuntranslation/index.html

Tom Gally

[Brendan Craine]

Tom,

Thank you for sharing this! The whole collection of "Gboard" videos really made my evening.

Though I admit, I may not sleep as well seeing what Chat GPT-4 did with those prompts. I had been hoping that pun-translation would remain a bastion for wordplay degenerates like myself.

Have you ever tried asking GPT-4 to translate a feghoot? I would be interested to see how it handles something like that (but I have not yet paid for access, myself).

Best,
Brendan

2023年10月5日(木) 21:15 Tom Gally <tomg...@gmail.com>:

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チーフエディター『エクスポート・ジャパン株式会社』
ブレンダン・クレイン （Brendan Craine）
email: brendan@export-japan.co.jp

[Tom Gally]

Brendan Craine wrote:

I may not sleep as well seeing what Chat GPT-4 did with those prompts. I had been hoping that pun-translation would remain a bastion for wordplay degenerates like myself.

If it is any consolation, it can be very bad at explaining puns. 

I wanted to see if GPT-4 would be able to identify humor, including puns, so I gave it the transcript of the video and asked for its assessment:

https://gally.net//temp/20231006gptpuntranslation/index2.html

If you scroll to the end and read its response, you’ll see that most or all of its explanations of puns are wrong. 帽子だけに、まぁ、いいかと, for example, is not a playful comment on 帽子 sounding like まぁ (huh?). Rather, it is a reference to the multiple meanings of 被って in the previous sentence.

In tests of GPT-4’s language competence, I have often seen it hallucinate about how words are pronounced. It’s very good at explaining the meanings of words, but spelling and pronunciation—probably because of its token-based training—are weaknesses.

Have you ever tried asking GPT-4 to translate a feghoot? 

Do you happen to know any feghoots that could not have been in GPT-4’s training data? If so, send one or two to me and I will be happy to test them for you.

Tom Gally

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/honyaku/CAMhgjJErwRXbwr0Tk_BpAp9VOXVbH20AsDUTxFaF2XB56husBQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Kevin Johnson]

First of all, fun topic! Laughed.

A little disappointed by the puns, though. I think this example is weak because the "head and shoulders" type stuff is dead obvious. There's too much here that works in either language with barely any changes required. Some of the other examples are more impressive (esp. "head turner" because it's a fashion joke). But overall, too much linguistic overlap for this to be too interesting IMO.

Anyway, I actually had a pun in a job I just finished this morning. It was talking about how 避雷針 are really 被雷針. This is the best kind of pun: insightful, thought-provoking, and funny at the same time.

I was really curious how the bogeyman would translate this so I plugged it in. Unfortunately, it just said "not a lightning rod but a rod that gets struck by lightning." Big whiff. It did go on to give an explanation that was closer to the point while still being wrong: "This phrase emphasizes the difference between a device designed to divert or protect against lightning (避雷針) and one that is intended or prone to get struck by lightning (被雷針). It could be used metaphorically to differentiate between something that deflects problems and something that attracts or undergoes them."

It's still not getting the core insight, which is that your basic lightning rod actually "attracts" lightning rather than "avoiding" it, with the implication that lightning rods are actually dangerous for that reason. Instead it thinks we're talking about two different types of products or devices that are designed for different things. So since it missed the entire point, Skynet just couldn't be useful here.

I see this sort of "missing the point" a lot from ChatGPT in my daily work, but today's just happened to be timely. Often "missing the point" means ChatGPT just isn't good enough.

I went on to ask it to literally explain the pun and it did even worse. I gave it a few attempts to clarify but all it said was the pun is on the first character and the meanings contrast with each other without explaining the core insight or the point it's making, then it descended into something about a "suffering-from-lightning rod" which is a "a rod that suffers from lightning" AKA "lightning needle." Really powerful stuff from the World Eater here.

I use GPT-4 as one of 10 standard dictionaries in my daily work, and my impression is that when it's explaining what words mean, it's often just directly translating Japanese dictionary or glossary definitions. It will whiff some translation attempts at whatever tough term I asked about, then at the bottom it will spit out something that is either a) completely wrong or b) reads suspiciously like a translated generic definition from a real resource -- cool, but I can just read those definitions myself, so I was hoping for some help getting closer to the precise English terms for the exact same concepts. Sometimes useful for that, sometimes not. Was shocked that it didn't know the term "uncollected accounts receivable" the other day, preferring "uncollected uncollected money." It usually provides inspiration for something to google rather than handing me the right answer.

And of course, sometimes it's just talking out of its arse. (Let's see that one translated.)

Kevin Johnson
Osaka