马斯克的"巴别塔"：当 AI 翻译撕开语言的墙

Today we'll talk about

a piece of news the whole world is discussing.

The story is about "translation."

This past April,

"X" —

that is, the platform formerly known as Twitter —

opened, to its global users,

a new feature:

all content

is automatically translated.

You see a Japanese person's Japanese post,

and the app immediately

turns it into a language you can read.

You see an Arabic post,

the same thing.

What you write in Chinese,

on the foreigner's side

they can also read.

This feature

actually started, at the end of March this year,

to slowly come online.

English-speaking users got it first,

then it gradually expanded to the rest of the world.

What the app uses

is, from Musk's own company,

an AI they made —

called "Grok."

It sounds

like just a small thing.

The feature has been in use for several months.

But over the past stretch of time,

this matter,

on the Chinese internet,

has suddenly become

a topic of nationwide discussion.

The reason,

we'll come to in a moment.

But before that,

let's mention

the name netizens have given

to this whole thing:

"Musk has built the Tower of Babel."

What is "the Tower of Babel"?

We have to first tell that story.

"The Tower of Babel"

comes from the Bible.

The story says

that long, long ago

all the people

spoke the same language.

They wanted, together, to build

a

very, very tall tower —

tall enough to reach heaven.

God saw this

and was not pleased.

God said:

"If these people stay together,

"there will be nothing

"they cannot do.

So God did one thing:

he made all people

start speaking different languages.

All at once, people

could not understand each other.

The tower

was never built.

The people scattered

and went to different places.

That is the reason why,

in today's world,

there are so many different languages.

Now Musk's "X"

lets all languages

understand each other again.

That's why netizens say

he is "building the Tower of Babel."

So,

after "the Tower of Babel" was built,

what did people see?

We'll talk about two sides.

The first side

is connection and fun.

People from different countries

for the first time

are talking directly.

For example,

Japanese netizens

love to make a kind of dish

they call "Japanese-style Italian pasta."

But the way they make it is very strange.

Now Italians can read it,

and they posted:

"What did we Italians

"do wrong?

Sob sob.

A Korean netizen joked:

"It feels right now

"like getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom,

"and seeing an Italian uncle

"and an Indonesian auntie

"in my kitchen

"going through my fridge.

Many people discovered

that people around the world

share roughly the same

sense of humor and worries.

That's the very warm side.

But

the second side

isn't so warm.

Some words

were originally only said

within a single country.

Now suddenly,

the whole world can see them.

The most well-known example

is Japan.

Japan's previous image to the world

was "very polite,

"very orderly,

"very cultured."

This image

was built up, over decades,

slowly.

But after the translation feature went live,

many foreigners,

for the first time, directly saw

what Japanese netizens, inside their own country,

actually say.

Some Japanese people

deny historical events,

say things about Chinese people

and Korean people

that are very unpleasant.

Other Japanese people

talked about foreign tourists

in very ugly terms.

After these words were translated,

the whole world saw them.

In other words,

the reason Chinese-speaking users have suddenly

paid such close attention to this matter

isn't that the feature just launched —

it's that they just realized:

Japan's internet

isn't what we thought it was.

One Arabic netizen said:

"Japan spent decades

"building a good image —

"Musk and his translation machine

"destroyed it in a week.

That, of course, is exaggerated,

but it pointed at a fact:

in the past,

language was a wall.

Whatever you said inside the wall,

people outside couldn't hear.

Now the wall is gone.

What you say inside your own country

the whole world can see.

And the other way too.

What Chinese netizens say

foreigners can now also see.

What we used to think of

as a joke between "our own people"

has become

content the whole world is reading.

At this point

I want to share a little

of my own thinking.

This matter

shows us

a new reality:

the internet is getting bigger

and at the same time more "close."

We used to feel

that, inside our own language,

we were safe.

Not anymore.

Every sentence

can possibly

be heard by the whole world.

This is a good thing,

and a new responsibility.

We have to start thinking:

every sentence I say —

is it really

something I want the whole world to hear?

Finally I want to ask you:

If every Moments post you write,

every Weibo,

could also be read by foreigners —

would you

be even a little bit different?

Think about it.

Okay.

That's all for today.

Talk tomorrow.