Human v artificial intelligence

​

If you wanted to translate an important piece of text, would you hire a translator versed in the culture, the colloquialisms, the neologisms and quirks of both the original language and the language into which it is to be translated, or would you simply run it through Google Translate and hope for the best?

​

It's no surprise that there are lots of text analysis tools and applications available now; artificial intelligence (AI) wasn't about to leave coding out of its casting net. These quite sophisticated tools can provide a quick and seemingly cost-effective analysis of all those thousands of comments, "at the click of a button".

​

Seems like a no brainer (pun intended). . .

​

. . .but let us consider the English language before we hand over all control to the ‘bots. . .

​

The English language is large and flexible, with its phrasal verbs, idioms, slang, and grammatical patterns;  some of the reasons why it is one of the most difficult languages to learn.

​

For all its sophistication AI, unlike humans, cannot understand humour, subtext, and most importantly, context. It is very likely to miss the detail, nuance, and the kind of subtleties that make all the difference to the meaning of a sentence. Even a simple sentence such as:

​

‘I just love your company…NOT!’  will likely be interpreted by the robots positively, except it is the total opposite.

 

AI is not capable of joining the dots or understanding the context; quite simply it cannot make sense of the English language.

 

What does make sense is utilising the contextual experience and skills of a human being, a highly skilled coding expert who will make total sense of your survey comments.

​

To end: out of curiosity I have trialed some text analysis tools and whilst being somewhat impressed by the functionality of these, they require much preparation prior to running the application, followed by a lot of tidying up; a significant amount of time overall and a good level of skill and expertise necessary to make the costly tool worthwhile. They do have their place - perhaps very large scale surveys, quick and dirty surveys, surveys for the sake of. In fact a representative for one of the tools I trialed told me they agreed entirely with my thoughts and comments on AI text analysis, having read this website. 

​

There is of course a place for us both, but if you need  real brains for real insight  please click here to contact a human being.

​

​

​