Ask Slashdot: Are YouTube's Subtitles 'Appallingly Bad'?
- Reference: 0183105788
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/05/02/1914208/ask-slashdot-are-youtubes-subtitles-appallingly-bad
- Source link:
"The subtitling is terrible!"
> Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable. And no effort whatsoever is made to use context to figure out whether a place name is Russian or Arabic, and often complete garbage is used in place of a common French, Spanish or Italian name!
>
> If AI actually works (I have my doubts about this), surely it would be possible to figure out language contexts. If it is about an event in Italy, then expect a lot of Italian names! If it is about the Russia-Ukraine war, then expect places in Russia or Ukraine to be more plausible than mindless gobbledygook! Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America? (However, plenty of names of people and places famous in America are also regularly screwed up.)
They argue the subtitles are "appallingly bad" — and that "the situation seems to be getting worse," wondering why the problem isn't addressed with some basic spell-checking. ("I'm sure that the vast majority of foul-ups could be fixed by the use of a dictionary.") Have any Slashdot readers seen similar problems? A friend of mine noticed that YouTube's subtitles even [2]bungled this innocuous song from the 1966.
ANNETTE FUNICELLO : "If your love is true love, you can tell by his touch."
YOUTUBE SUBTITLE : "If your love is too lava, you can tell by his touch..."
Share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments. And do you think YouTube's subtitles are "appallingly bad"?
[1] https://www.slashdot.org/~Anne+Thwacks
[2] https://youtu.be/6nDXj9hJOaA?list=RDL8ZLXj1y4Gs&t=47
Time was, image search had like 20% accuracy (Score:1)
But 20% of all the internet's traffic is still more than enough to make more money than God.
Different set of incentives at play here.
especially bad translations of pronouns (Score:2)
For many years, my friends and I have noticed that Google Translate (and YouTube) have a better chance of getting a European language pronoun wrong than correct.
We've noticed this: French, Italian, German, Spanish ... and most of the Scandinavian languages all suffer from this.
It must somehow be related to how those LLMs are trained.
Re: especially bad translations of pronouns (Score:1)
Too woke for strongly gendered languages?
Maybe that's why my emails keep getting lost: it can't tell a mail server from a femail server!
Thank you! I'll be here all week!
yes, they are terrible (Score:2)
but they are better than nothing. I sometimes watch foreign content and i appreciate the attempt at a translation even if it is bad. Helps me to understand people like Angine de Poitrine.
Re: (Score:2)
As a musician I can promise you trying to figure out the "foreign" context wont help you understand Angine de Poitrine. The whacky costumes and the like are part of a very english speaking tradition, punk absurdism. Likewise musically, they are coming from a group of musical genres thats about as english speaking as you get , prog rock and jam bands. That they are french speaking canadians is almost irrelevant, other than the fact that they've been known amonst qubecans longer than the rest of the anglosphe
Sure (Score:2)
It's quite hilarious for me watching foreign videos where I can't tell what they might have actually said because I lack any context, all I can do is boggle.
I have seen improvement, but it's mostly in the software's ability to pick speech out of noise. The comprehension part is still nonexistent.
Re: (Score:2)
Go back to the previous pre-LLM technology. Happy now?
lots of AI shorts (Score:2)
Daisychained clickbait asking users to "Like" and subscribe, I watch some YouTube garbage when I am bored with nothing to do but I never interact with Liking or subscribing because it's just not worth it, I would guess for every million videos of clickbait there is one video that is actually has value from being informative
What's your beef with Betteridge? (Score:2)
There was no need to phrase this as a question: if you have ever used YouTube subtitles, you'll know they are bad.
The real question is why. While I think AI is overhyped in general, I don't believe that this is the best Google could do if they put in some effort. It seems the model is just picking the most likely word on an individual word level, not considering any context like the video title or description (which can contain the very names it gets wrong), the type of content the channel typically publish
Favorite subtitle (Score:2)
Not on YouTube, but on the Firefly DVDs(!): "You're a rabbit, Mal!"
I find them pretty danged good (Score:2)
Somewhere between the 25th and 50th percentile of a stenographer that hasn't pre programmed names.
Not all (Score:2)
[1]Some [youtube.com] are OK.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL9iMPx9CpQ
Appallingly bad (Score:2)
I rarely see _any_ subtitles that are not appallingly bad, including YouTube.
Re: (Score:2)
Beat me to it. Yes, Youtube subtitles are generally appallingly bad, but when I watch movies with subtitles on DVD or Bluray they're often also garbage. In some cases it appears the person creating the subtitles is working from a different script to the movie as shot because the words bear no relation at all to what they're saying on the screen.
Re: Appallingly bad (Score:1)
In commercial content, I think this is more of an issue with dubbed audio tracks. On the other hand, subtitles tend to be fairly faithful translations of the original audio, which -for practical reasons- is often not an exact match for the dubbed version. In fact, a good dub is usually adapted to the target languageâ(TM)s customs rather than being a literal, word-for-word translation. Additionally, dubbed dialogue has to account for lip-sync so it doesnâ(TM)t break the viewerâ(TM)s immersion
Re: (Score:2)
It's possible. But in some cases we've been watching with English subtitles on an English TV show with people speaking in English because my girlfriend doesn't understand English English. The words in the subtitles still don't necessarily match the words they're saying in the same language.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure what movies you're talking about, but closed caption subtitles on a typical Bluray are word for word transcribed in literally every movie in my vast collection. There is of course the occasional hiccup, a typo or word missing, but if that happens once in any feature film it's already worse than normal.
Are you talking about foreign language films or something?
Re: (Score:2)
I watched a Japanese pronunciation video which had been run through English speech-to-text processor to create subtitles. Even the English words were incorrectly detected.
I mentioned last week, that such processors can't handle homonyms: Always writing "brake" instead of "break".
Nah (Score:1)
> Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America?
Why should YouTube be any better than the average American?
Captions Plus! (Score:2)
BUT if you Subscribe! We will fix the captions. ;-)
Heat (Score:2)
Every single stupid time there's just music playing and the stupid subtitler prints "Heat. Heat" and I'd like to see the whole of the YouTube/Google management complex to experience flashpoint/ignition heat.
Humans are terrible at hearing lyrics (Score:2)
Over the years there have been many lists published of lyrics people thought they heard but were completely nonsensical. To some apparently Abba sings, "feel the beat of the tangerine."
So I'm not surprised youtube can't understand song lyrics. Regular speaking, it's fairly good. And not too bad at translating the subtitles.
They're Broken (Score:2)
YouTube's subtitles turn themselves on after every ad for some reason.
I don't think they're really any worse. (Score:2)
Than Google's voice to text.
I use it pretty much every time I'm writing something (like right now)
And it is pretty darn High error rate.
For instance why did it capitalize High and why did it make has into is?
Some of it, I'm sure, has to do with working with really poor pronunciation. Most people tend to blur and slur when they're speaking.
And then depending on the listener to straighten out what it was they said.
tiny model? (Score:2)
I use Whisper to generates subtitles on occasion. If you use a tiny model, it is pretty terrible. If you use a large model, it does a pretty good job, even doing phonetic spellings of unusual names. The large model takes some real cpu time to do the analysis, and YouTube isn't gonna burn money for free features.
Accents (Score:2)
AI has always been and will continue to be terrible with accents. Each new accent is like a whole new language it has to learn. Niche accents will never have enough training data.
Crunchyroll Too (Score:2)
Same thing happens with some newer animes on Crunchyroll. The CC is sometimes complete nonsense. If the content is live, I can totally understand the CC being a little rough. But the content I'm watching is pre-recorded and has a script. The script could easily be provided, stripped of everything not needed for CC, and then synced to the video. Hell, use the AI to sync it, but there should never be any reason an AI is just making up random, wrong shit for pre-recorded content that has a script available. It
Hitler's plan for food (Score:1)
[1]https://imgur.com/a/tQ1OboP [imgur.com]
[1] https://imgur.com/a/tQ1OboP
Subtitles are bad but (Score:2)
Closed Captions are even worse. It's in many news outlet Youtube channel.
It's like it was translated to some other language and back to English with a 90's translator, with lot of missing words, in all capital letters and with a 15 seconds delay.
Mind you, are the authors that provides the content of these hateful CC's.
They're supposed to be at least decent, because they're (supposedly) human-made and directed to hearing impaired people.
Oh and Youtube don't let you fallback to regular automatic subtitles. It
Nah (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just that the entire YouTube is appallingly bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Youtube has plenty of good content. The caveat being what is pushed on their main page is utter garbage so you have to actively search for it. Take Adam Savage for example. He toured a facility that scans imax film and showed the original one off film scanning machine built 25 years ago. It's an engineering work of art. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkAWTmpTBc
YouTube Audio Quality - Bad Production (Score:2)
> It's just that the entire YouTube is appallingly bad.
A lot of the audio production in individual videos is really bad. This isn't anything to do with YouTube per se, not their compression algorithms or other features. A lot of YouTubers have absolutely no concept of microphone placement, of using audio compression, of reducing background noise. All of which are things which will drastically affect audio quality and the ability of a speech-to-text model to create subtitles.
It would be nice if YouTube would normalize all the uploaded videos to one set standard.