Oct 23, 2026, 3:38 AMRIP to the closed caption workforce, tossed aside by AI generated slop that can’t discern jargon, accents, idiom, slang and all the things that actual humans can understand and transcribe. I feel sorry for deaf people who use streaming services that use that garbage.
@kevbob Yes it so bad now and often can't keep up with the conversation. I can definitely tell the difference.
@joltrast is YouTube using AI captions? I've seen stuff on there recently that was terrible.
Oct 23, 2026, 9:19 AMYouTube has been using some form of autogenerated captions for a long time.
I remember watching How it's Made Oreos on there a few years back (2018 I think) and noticing that the captions put in "Chris penis" instead of "crispiness"
Oct 23, 2026, 6:06 AM@kevbob The AI slop is worse than you say. Words that sound almost the same in the source are mixed up. So, in the target language you have to translate back to the original in your head, figure out what was really said, and then translate forward to your own language.
@kevbob All types of people are using closed captions, actually, this is one of the most widely usage with videos, because people are not native language speakers, or can't play sound in their current setting. Slopping them up is not only mean to the disabled, but stupid for the business. Dumbasses.
Oct 23, 2026, 9:00 AM
@kevbob It's really, really bad. Captions are on at the Gym and if it's older show on rerun it's great!
But then a new show comes on and it's literally unreadable like it's being typed by an drunk raccoon. Like it can't figure out what letters to type for sounds or where words end and begin.
Somehow this is acceptable when it's absolutely not.
Oct 23, 2026, 12:55 PM@kevbob hi, deaf guy here, you don't need to feel sorry for me. human transcribers only subtitled a teeny tiny proportion of content, so automating it is great even if the automation isn't perfect.
Oct 23, 2026, 3:55 PM@DrHyde very very very excellent point, and I can understand that. I guess I was lamenting reading anecdotes from people who did this for a living and suddenly were off the job. And I can see that flawed is better than none at all. I have reduced hearing into my 60s so it helps me but I get mad at the really stupid things put in with automation that make no sense, but yeah, I still understand what is going on.
Oct 23, 2026, 5:15 PM@kevbob yeah, it sucks for them, just like it sucked for all the people who used to make cloth by hand and had their jobs automated away by power looms, and all the people who planted seeds in the fields by hand and had their jobs automated away by seed drills. And now more people can have warm clean clothes every day, and more people can have lots of nutritious food, and more people can have subtitles, all of which are a net good thing, I think, despite the temporary job losses.
Oct 23, 2026, 5:17 PM@kevbob and I say all that as one of the temporary job losses. My ex-employer made lots of people redundant because they are automating code production. I, like the cloth makers and farm labourers, will find something else.
@kevbob My spouse is fluent in several languages and we sometimes watch movies in those languages (with the captions on for me). She routinely, and I mean every time, says, “That’s not what [he/she] said! It’s not just bad, or poor word choice. Often the meaning is changed. This usually occurs when a phrase is ironic or has idiomatic meaning — and that is the curse of #AI captioning. A good translation captures the meaning of what is said, and a #LLM does not have any semantic ability whatsoever, much less ability to reason.