It is probably good that OS community are exploring this however I’m not sure the technology is ready (or will ever be maybe) and it potentially undermines the labour intensive activity of producing high quality subtitling for accessibility.
I use them quite a lot and I’ve noticed they really struggle on key things like regional/national dialects, subject specific words and situations where context would allow improvement (e.g. a word invented solely in the universe of the media). So it’s probably managing 95% accuracy which is that danger zone where its good enough that no one checks it but bad enough that it can be really confusing if you are reliant on then. If we care about accessibility we need to care about it being high quality.
While good quality subtitles are essential VLC can’t ensure that, it’s the responsibility of the production studio. AI subtitles on vlc are for those videos which doesn’t have any sub (which are a lot). The pushback shouldn’t be for vlc implementing AI, but production studios replacing translators or transcriber with AI (like crunchyroll tried last year).
Also while transcribing and subtitle editing is a labour intensive job, use of AI to help the editors shouldn’t be discouraged, it can increase their productivity by automating repeatative tasks so that they can focus on better quality.
Agreed that the studios need to be held more accountable and their usage of AI is more problematic than open source last resort type work. I have noticed a degradation of quality in the last five years on mainstream sources.
However, the existence of this last resort tool will shift the dynamics of the “market” for the work that should be being done. Even in the open source community. There used to be an active community of people giving their voluntary labour to writing subtitles for those that lacked them (they may still be active I don’t know). Are they as likely to do that if they think oh well it can be automatically done now?
The real challenge with the argument that it helps editors is the same as the challenge for Automated Driving. If something performs at 95% you actually end up deskilling and stepping down the attention focus and make it more likely to miss that 5% that requires manual intervention. I think it also has a material impact on the wellbeing of those doing the labour.
To be clear I’m not anti this at all but think we need to think carefully about the structures and processes around it to ensure it does lead to improvement in quality not just an improvement in quantity at the cost of quality.
It is probably good that OS community are exploring this however I’m not sure the technology is ready (or will ever be maybe) and it potentially undermines the labour intensive activity of producing high quality subtitling for accessibility.
I use them quite a lot and I’ve noticed they really struggle on key things like regional/national dialects, subject specific words and situations where context would allow improvement (e.g. a word invented solely in the universe of the media). So it’s probably managing 95% accuracy which is that danger zone where its good enough that no one checks it but bad enough that it can be really confusing if you are reliant on then. If we care about accessibility we need to care about it being high quality.
While good quality subtitles are essential VLC can’t ensure that, it’s the responsibility of the production studio. AI subtitles on vlc are for those videos which doesn’t have any sub (which are a lot). The pushback shouldn’t be for vlc implementing AI, but production studios replacing translators or transcriber with AI (like crunchyroll tried last year).
Also while transcribing and subtitle editing is a labour intensive job, use of AI to help the editors shouldn’t be discouraged, it can increase their productivity by automating repeatative tasks so that they can focus on better quality.
Agreed that the studios need to be held more accountable and their usage of AI is more problematic than open source last resort type work. I have noticed a degradation of quality in the last five years on mainstream sources.
However, the existence of this last resort tool will shift the dynamics of the “market” for the work that should be being done. Even in the open source community. There used to be an active community of people giving their voluntary labour to writing subtitles for those that lacked them (they may still be active I don’t know). Are they as likely to do that if they think oh well it can be automatically done now?
The real challenge with the argument that it helps editors is the same as the challenge for Automated Driving. If something performs at 95% you actually end up deskilling and stepping down the attention focus and make it more likely to miss that 5% that requires manual intervention. I think it also has a material impact on the wellbeing of those doing the labour.
To be clear I’m not anti this at all but think we need to think carefully about the structures and processes around it to ensure it does lead to improvement in quality not just an improvement in quantity at the cost of quality.