Should you tell a friend when artificial intelligence mangles her message?
A few days ago, I learned that a former international student had been interviewed by a news channel in her country about her professional work. The news channel had posted the interview to its YouTube channel which made it easy to find.
The interview was conducted in Telugu, a language most commonly used in southern India. But YouTube had applied its automatic dubbing feature so the words being spoken were translated to English. What a terrific use of AI since I have absolutely no capacity to understand Telugu.
Except it didn’t work.
That’s not exactly true. The auto-dub feature did translate the video to English, but not phrases or sentences that made sense. Occasionally, there was just a syntax issue where words were out of order and I could sort of make out what the interviewer or my former student had presumably meant. But these occasions were rare.
At one point, for example, the former student mentions that her parents used to “roll babies” to make money. I’m pretty sure this isn’t accurate. Cigarettes were mentioned later in that portion of the exchange, so maybe they rolled cigarettes? I have no idea. By the time I finished struggling to figure out what “rolling babies” meant, a slew of other words that equally made no sense came through.
I hesitated to contact the student to let her know, but then I decided I should. Since she is living in India now, she wouldn’t know that folks like me who live in a primarily English-speaking area would be receiving the bad automatic dubbing. She thanked me and sent me some articles she had written about her work that were written in English. She also told me she would let the broadcaster know about the faulty dubbing.
The auto-dub via AI is a relatively new feature on YouTube. Apparently, it gets applied when a creator uploads videos. To avoid having it applied, a creator must finagle the settings when uploading to not have it featured on its videos. It’s my understanding that users like me can’t turn it off, although there are many YouTube videos online offering hacks on how to trick YouTube into thinking I’m someplace that speaks Telugu so it won’t dub videos I receive. Too much work.
Contacting my former student was the right thing to do. Her contacting the broadcaster was also the right thing to do. According to the online hacks, there’s also a way to provide YouTube feedback on such features if they don’t work well. While that too is work, it also seems the right thing to do.
In the meantime, if I were the broadcaster, I’d turn off the auto-dubbing feature until it can actually do what it’s designed to do, which I assume will happen eventually. When it does, it could be a beautiful thing.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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