First, we need to choose a topic because AI couldn’t choose for us without our input. Topics crossing our mind ranging from commercials for Monterey Language Service, trends for the translation and language industry, learning to ride bicycle, birds nesting, etc. The videos generated from these topics were unadorned, so we finally decided to make it easy for AI. We chose a topic that has a lot of materials for AI to go on — what is Genesis: A Creation of the Earth Story.

As predicted, the outcome is enjoyable. This video, showcasing the wonder of creation in seven days, the birth of the universe and the origin of life, is a testament to the union of art, technology, and imagination.

Please see the video here: https://youtu.be/u7zpyToo_Ls

We also are in the process of translating the English transcript to create traditional and simplified Chinese versions of the video.

The Process of Making the Script

The next step is to create a script. We wanted it to be detailed, blending poetic imagery with vivid descriptions, so we wrote a script based off Psalm 104 in the bible. The script emphasized a resonant style of classic religious art and modern fantasy aesthetics.

The voice talent came from the AI’s databases. The narration was not exactly what we fed the AI to, instead the AI used our prompt as a reference and generated the transcript read by the AI.

Creating the script using AI was a process of trial and error. Not specifying exactly what should happen in each scene would leave everything up to AI. At the same time, depending on the program there’s a limit to how much information we can feed the AI, so we can’t be overly detailed either. It’s best to think about the AI as someone you’re trying to explain your vision to.

We made all the explanations specifically so that the AI video generator understood and was able to make the video. All the necessity was to give information through human prompts to AI and let it generate everything from its databases.

Getting a result was quick, but the first version that came out needed some work, so it was tweaked by giving the AI notes on the general style of the video. We can specify a western animation style, eastern animation style, or black and white, etc.

After this, the prompt was further edited by dictating each scene. For most video generative AI, this is how you can make sure that the progression of the video happens the way you imagined it. See our dictation of scenes at the end of the blog.

The Potential of Creating an AI Movie

We think AI has chosen a wonderfully vibrant voice who delivers the excitement of first creation and keeps the audience captive. This voice brings out the soul of the video and it’s touching and not mechanic as we thought what AI creation would be like. AI makes videos that are human like. The AI potential is certainly there.

However, as with everything AI, there’s a lot to consider. Right now, AI can handle short, prompt-based videos with simple concepts, but it’s hard to tell what full-length movies made by AI would turn out to be like. There’s a lot that goes into making full movies, so it’s hard to imagine that AI can replace humans or save a lot of human time during the process.

However, this short video we made certainly shows proof of the concept that AI has the potential in making full movies that we are used to watching.

AI as a Creative Partner

After we put the script into the chat box, AI analyzed the script, prepared the video materials and began generating. The whole process took no longer than ten minutes.

The video of Genesis: A Creation of the Earth Story contains both narration and visuals. It’s amazing to see AI can generate a deep, resonant male voice paraphrasing the script, guiding viewers through the journey. The video is rife with video footage with some illustrations that align closely with the scenes described in the script. From the light breaking the darkness to sun and stars, and to the peaceful creation of humankind, each moment is visually represented.

This video is a celebration of creative collaboration between humans and AI. This project highlights how AI can be an invaluable partner in creating artistic projects. From generating visuals to refining language, AI helped us bring our ideas to life.

Despite the wonderful AI work, we noticed some flaws in the video: lack of a cover page and one unrelated B roll. We tried at first to further edit the prompt, telling AI to add a cover page and a title, however, the feedback was “Please clarify ‘subtitle’”.

Making AI delete the unrelated part was not smooth too, so we had to import the video into our usual video editor Adobe Premier Pro to manually delete it.

The conclusion is: Smooth and understandable conversation between humans and AI still has a long way to go. Yet, AI’s strength will grow with user input and will become better and better as long as it is continued to be used.

“Genesis – A Creation Story

Style: Epic, painterly, awe-inspiring, vibrant, and emotionally resonant. Think classic religious paintings combined with modern fantasy art.

Subject: The creation of the universe and life, in seven distinct scenes, each representing a “day” of creation.

Scene 1: Let There Be Light: Focus on the transition from absolute darkness to the first light. A gentle, almost imperceptible breath of color emerges, pushing back the void. Hues of amethyst and rose paint the darkness. Emphasize the quiet power of this moment.

Scene 2: The Firmament: God’s hand sweeps across the canvas, creating the heavens. Waters are separated, forming a shimmering dome. Celestial mist swirls and coalesces. Angels, depicted as beings of pure light, watch in silent awe.

Scene 3: Earth and Seas: The waters below are gathered, and dry land rises. Focus on the emerging continents, still wet and glistening. The land is bare but expectant.

Scene 4: Vegetation: An explosion of life! Plants, grasses, trees of all kinds burst forth. Focus on vibrant greens, from tender shoots to majestic trees laden with fruit. Each seed holds the promise of more life.

Scene 5: Celestial Lights: The sun, moon, and stars are placed in the firmament. The sun blazes with warmth, the moon glows softly, and the stars twinkle like diamonds on black velvet.

Scene 6: Creatures of Sea and Sky: The waters teem with life, from leviathans to tiny fish. Birds of all shapes and sizes fill the air, their wings carrying them across the sky.

Scene 7: Land Animals and Humankind: Animals roam the land, each unique and wondrous. Finally, God creates humankind, breathing life into them and imbuing them with His image. They are placed in a beautiful garden, a paradise of harmony.

Mood: Reverent, majestic, wondrous, peaceful, and ultimately joyful.

Keywords: Creation, God, light, darkness, heavens, earth, seas, plants, animals, humankind, garden, paradise, breath, whisper, symphony, cosmos.

Additional Notes: Pay attention to the details. The textures, light, and colors should evoke a sense of the divine. The overall impression should be one of awe and wonder at the majesty of creation. Consider using a color palette that evolves throughout the scenes, starting with muted tones and gradually becoming more vibrant as life appears.”

The source article is in Chinese. Click the picture to be directed.

We have summarized a very interesting article that highlights the most recent AI development as well as its future. Most of the information and comments are from this link which we translated. AI will become very powerful in every aspect, so the question for humans is how to apply it best in our world.

The next wave of AI: Studying the human brain 

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was won by Hopfield and Hinton. They used physics knowledge and tools to respectively invent the well-known artificial neural network, The Hopfield network and the Boltzmann machine, laying an important foundation for machine learning technology and promoting the development of AI.

Artificial neural networks are technologies that imitate the operation of the human brain. Hinton said that if we can understand how the brain adjusts the strength of connections between neurons, we can create amazing AI systems like GPT-4. AI will definitely be better than humans. It will be more intelligent, have a wealth of knowledge, but require far fewer neural connections than humans.

Hassabis, who jointly won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Baker and is the founder of Google DeepMind, believes that the next stage of research can use AI models to analyze the human brain to promote progress in the field of neuroscience. “I think this is a complete cycle. Neuroscience kind of inspired modern AI, and then AI will come back to help us understand what’s special about the brain.”

Can AI knowledge surpass that of humans?

When asked whether or not AI will be able to surpass the knowledge of humans, Hinton said that he believes we’ve already been surpassed. He added that though AI still has the problem of fabricating facts, also known as hallucinating, it doesn’t change the fact that it still has a greater range of knowledge than any human being.

When asked for his comment, Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine, Ruvkun, said that he believes human capabilities have been overestimated, and humans are just as liable to create false information like AI does. This is especially true with the rise of social media, which has only made the situation more serious. He concluded his thoughts by saying that it’s necessary for AI to reach the level of human beings, but it’s not a level that’s too difficult to reach.

Hassabis was also in agreement, and said that AI capabilities will advance rapidly in all aspects. Consequently, it is very important to think about how humans will design the AI systems and how they are applied in the real world.

What is a Hopfield Network?

A Hopfield network is a type of recurrent artificial neural network, often considered a “content-addressable memory,” which is designed to store patterns and can retrieve a complete pattern even when given a partial or noisy input, essentially acting like an associative memory system by minimizing an “energy function” to reach stable states; named after its inventor, John Hopfield.

Structure:

A single layer of neurons where each neuron is connected to every other neuron in the network, with symmetric connections (meaning the weight from neuron A to B is the same as the weight from B to A).

Function:

By adjusting the connection weights, the network can store patterns, and when presented with a partial or noisy version of a stored pattern, it will iteratively update its state to converge towards the closest stored pattern.

Energy Minimization:

The network operates by minimizing an “energy function,” where each state change reduces the energy, eventually leading to a stable state representing a stored pattern.

Applications:

Image restoration, pattern recognition, optimization problems, and understanding associative memory in the brain.

We hope this has been an interesting read. Now, what’s next? We look forward to seeing you in the next blog!

The making of our Thanksgiving video was a journey that reminded us of the unique value human creativity brings to our work.

In a world where AI tools are rapidly evolving, we see AI not as competition but as an opportunity to reflect on the qualities that set us apart.

Our process—rooted in collaboration, thoughtfulness, and emotional nuance—is a testament to the irreplaceable role of the human touch in crafting meaningful connections.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, we decided to create a heartfelt greeting video to thank everyone—our clients, coworkers, and friends. Through our combined team efforts, we were able to make a video that sets us apart from AI. Here’s our process on how we made this year’s video special.

We gathered photos of our team members in action—focused, collaborating, and working wisely. These images were the perfect way to showcase the dedication and effort we put into every project. Each picture highlighted a different aspect of our work, whether in the office, in meetings, or working remotely.

We also gathered photos of our team celebrating Thanksgiving together. Whether we were sharing a toast, giving thanks, or simply enjoying each other’s company. These images added a joyful, festival touch to the video. It was important for us to show not only our professional side but also the warmth we share as a team.

To step it up a notch, we reached out to Layla and asked her to write a poem that would capture the team, dedication, and the spirit of Thanksgiving. Layla’s words were both thoughtful and inspiring. The poem beautifully expressed our gratitude and teamwork.

In praise of work partners

Integrity, merit, jubilation
Honorably, you display

Collaborative endeavors and dynamic talents
Significant affiliation creates

Vigorous diligence and wise resolutions
Remarkable admiration cultivates

Our heartfelt gratitude we proclaim to you
A bountiful Thanksgiving we wish for you

We carefully selected the best visuals to match each part of the poem, ensuring the transitions felt seamless and natural. We also added more Thanksgiving elements to make the video warmer and more festive.  We show Layla’s poem in its entirety at the end, but have stanzas of her poem alternate with our wishes and pictures of our staff. The result is a very interesting video that will make the viewer feel the warm greetings from Monterey Language Services while making sure that our thanks are conveyed.

One important thing we did in this video was feature our clients. It’s important to show that we’re all more than just a faceless company, but a team of people who are all working toward a common goal. It helps to show harmony, joy, and peace. This is something that we did last year as well, and something that we will continue to do each year.

We made sure that the transitions were consistent across the entire video and had a method where we would have the text fly in, and then when the next slide had pictures, we’d do a door opening effect. The door opening effect was used for all the pictures, but for text-to-text transitions, we had a slide effect. This was all very intentionally engineered to make a very smooth and comforting feel for the viewer as they watched the video.

From start to finish, we made sure every element of the video reflected the gratitude we feel for our clients, coworkers, and friends. It’s not just about the work we do; it’s about the connections we build and the community we’re part of.

Once completed, we were proud to share the final product—a video that not only conveyed our thanks but also celebrated teamwork, dedication, and joy. It was a reminder that the work we do is about more than just business; it’s about the people we collaborate with, and the relationships we build along the way. It has truly been a joy to work with all our clients and we look forward to our continued collaboration!

When people ask us if Chat GPT or AI is a threat to us, we will proudly answer no. We take a higher road that involves beauty, nuances, and uniqueness that only humans work together as a team can create!  AI produced work is plain and predictable. In our opinion, AI in fact has a long way to go in the language industry!

We often present clients with guidance on how to work with interpreters, and frequently get asked about AI. This is because many people are waiting for the day that they can simply go online and use AI to seamlessly translate between two different languages, but we would like to say it out loud here: THAT DAY HAS YET TO COME.

Please also check out this flip-book we’ve made https://heyzine.com/flip-book/20de67a12a.html

Please also check out our playlist for Chinese localization case studies: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO-QGEbwcTr14xqfiR38Mp-EhHAmclsUY

We localized the Interpreters and Music video into traditional Chinese as an example to compare translation accuracy between humans versus AI and to identify some classic AI issues.

One of the biggest weaknesses of AI is that it often struggles with names. For instance, the name “Laura” was translated into both “蘿拉” and “勞拉.” When we saw this inconsistency in names, we looked at each other with amusement because this happens all the time. Some may say AI spelling names incorrectly isn’t a big deal since it’s an easy fix. However, for those people, we’d like to share a real-life example.

In a lease contract we worked on, Paragraph 1 said that the landlord shall be known as ‘A’ and the tenant as ‘B’. Paragraph 2 called the landlord ‘C’ and the tenant ‘D’. This was a document with 30,000 words that a client asked us to quote for reviewing the translation, which had probably been done by an AI. Just in terms of reviewing names, how much effort would it take to find out if there were places that call the landlord “E” and the tenant “F” and so on? Not to mention all the work it would take to find other mistakes that humans typically need several rounds of review to detect.

Our analysis also uncovered that AI defaults to using the pronoun “你,” referring to males and offering no female form “妳.”

AI have translated love song titles like “Suddenly Missing You” and “Stuck on You” into traditional Chinese, using the male form. The male singers may not prefer using the male form of “you” in their love song titles. Otherwise, a native speaker in traditional Chinese would feel kind of strange, reading it.

We inserted line breaks on messages that appear in the video. With line breaks, AI seemed to lose the context of the lines.

Line breaks are important. We are often requested to insert line breaks in Asian language marketing materials. Take Japanese line breaks as an example. There are some basic rules for line breaks or how to break words up, but at the same time, there are a lot of exceptions, which humans can easily catch if they understand Japanese, but not AI. In other words, humans break things apart (debriefing) and put them together in a creative way, which AI is just not capable of.

It turns out that AI struggles to translate any segment accurately and, at times, produces unnatural and contextually absurd translations. As shown in the screenshot below, even with a relatively short source text, the quality of AI translation was unbelievably subpar.

AI translated “interpretation” as “explanation” due to a lack of context.
AI translated “Performance” to machine’s performance rather than that of the interpreter’s.
AI mistakenly translated the meaning of “like” as “to be fond of” instead of “similar to.”
AI word-for-word translation for “big heart” doesn’t make sense to a Chinese audience.

It’s clear to us that AI is not able to handle messages that are broken down by line breaks. This then leads us to a question: How well could AI handle entire messages without line breaks?

We conducted a retest by removing all the line breaks on messages. In this attempt, the text was formatted in a more machine-friendly way to enhance AI’s understanding. But even so, post-editing remained an essential step, with 80% of the segments requiring significant human intervention. Without this crucial step, AI translations either come across as rigid and less relatable to our audience, or contain mistranslations. Below are some examples.

Example 1:
The AI translation appears rather stiff because the word “sync” was translated literally. The audience might wonder what it means to “sync” one language to another. Human translators are able to further explain the context of sync, that is, interpreters “listen to one language and convey it in another language.”

Example 2:
AI translated “more emotionally acute” as “more impatient,” which not only deviates from the intended meaning of the source, but also negates the impact of the word “music”. During post-editing, we replaced it with “more emotionally sensitive,” which is more contextually accurate.

Example 3:
AI did word-for-word translation again. It doesn’t sound like what a normal person would say in Chinese. As a dynamic language, Chinese favors verbs over nouns and usually keeps sentences short. Therefore, in post-editing, we restructured the sentence to make it fit a typical Chinese writing style, and flow more naturally.

Example 4:
AI’s translation of “concentration” lacked clarity. Without referring to the source, it was hard to grasp the intended meaning. So, we opted for a more precise choice of words.

Example 5:
AI does a literal translation, full of ambiguity and rigidity, which doesn’t make clear sense to a Chinese audience.

Translation is supposed to flow naturally to engage the audience. It is the more immersive and relatable experiences that make humans feel comfortable. These are exactly the areas where we as interpreters and translators can contribute to.

There may be a lot of gloom and doom from some in the community who think that their jobs are at risk, however, the reality is that we’re training AI to speak our language, but they aren’t able to fully understand it like we can. They can process it, try and find the corresponding pattern in their database, and come to a conclusion that they think is right, but they won’t always be. That’s where interpreters and translators will always have the edge over AI. Human creativity and our ability to understand what’s important, and the culture embedded in it, enables us to make sure that we are conveying the intended message.

We tried one of the latest AI platforms to translate one of our office videos into Mandarin.

While we were impressed by the seamless process and the voice cloning feature that enhanced voice modulation, we couldn’t help but notice pronunciation and translation errors in the generated video. Given that Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, tones can become a source of misunderstanding if not pronounced correctly. The chosen video introduces the rental service of our conference room, making “conference” a high-frequency word. However, throughout the video, AI consistently pronounces the Chinese word for “conference,” as “memory,” with tones differing from the former. Also, “state-of-the-art” in Chinese is pronounced the same way that “cash” is. This could undoubtedly complicate the message we aim to convey if left alone.

The translation issues we caught are mostly recurring problems caused by machine translation as discussed above. Take the first sentence as an example. AI translated “Looking for a conference room to have a meeting over video or in person?” as “Can you look for a conference room via video or in person meeting?” AI’s rendition deviates from the original meaning, which is likely caused by line breaks, leading to confusion and miscommunication. Such discrepancies underscore the importance of post-editing and human intervention to refine machine-generated translations.

Our conclusion becomes clear.

In this age of AI becoming more prevalent, humans just need to work smarter to beat out AI. As individuals in an evolving world, it’s important to accept technological advancements, but also understand that AI lacks creativity, individuality, improvisation capability, and the understanding of human cultures. That’s how humans can break through and go beyond AI’s limitations.