“With state-of-the-art results, we believe SeamlessM4T is an important breakthrough in the AI community’s quest toward creating universal multitask systems,” Meta wrote in the blog post.

But one wonders what biases the model might contain.

A recent piece in The Conversation points out the many flaws in AI-powered translation, including different forms of gender bias. For example, Google Translate once presupposed that doctors were male while nurses were female in certain languages, while Bing’s translator translated phrases like “the table is soft” as the feminine “die Tabelle” in German, which refers to a table of figures.

Speech recognition algorithms, too, often contain biases. A study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that speech recognition systems from leading companies were twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from Black speakers as opposed to white speakers.

Unsurprisingly, SeamlessM4T isn’t unique in this regard.

In a whitepaper published alongside the blog post, Meta reveals that the model “overgeneralizes to masculine forms when translating from neutral terms” and performs better when translating from the masculine reference (e.g. nouns like “he” in English) for most languages.

Moreover, in the absence of gender information, SeamlessM4T prefers translating the masculine form about 10% of the time — perhaps due to an “overrepresentation of masculine lexica” in the training data, Meta speculates.

Meta makes the case that SeamlessM4T doesn’t add an outsize amount of toxic text in its translations, a common problem with translation and generative AI text models at large. But it’s not perfect. In some languages, like Bengali and Kyrgyz, SeamlessM4T makes more toxic translations — that is to say, hateful or profane translations — about socioeconomic status and culture. And in general, SeamlessM4T is more toxic in translations dealing with sexual orientation and religion.

Meta notes that the public demo for SeamlessM4T contains a filter for toxicity in inputted speech as well as a filter for potentially toxic outputted speech. That filter’s not present by default in the open source release of the model, however.

The larger issue with AI translators not addressed in the whitepaper is the loss of lexical richness that can result from their overuse. Unlike AI, human interpreters make choices unique to them when translating one language into another. They might explicate, normalize or condense and summarize, creating fingerprints known informally as “translationese.” AI systems might generate more “accurate” translations, but those translations could be coming at the expense of translation variety and diversity.

That’s probably why Meta advises against using SeamlessM4T for long-form translation and certified translations, like those recognized by government agencies and translation authorities. Meta also discourages deploying SeamlessM4T for medical or legal purposes — presumably an attempt to cover its bases in the event of a mistranslation.

That’s wise; there have been at least a few of instances where AI mistranslations have resulted in law enforcement mistakes. In September 2012, police erroneously confronted a Kurdish man for financing terrorism because of a mistranslated text message. And in 2017, a cop in Kansas used Google Translate to ask a Spanish-speaker if they could search their car for drugs, but because the translation was inaccurate, the driver didn’t fully understand what he’d agreed to and the case was eventually thrown out.

“This single system approach reduces errors and delays, increasing the efficiency and quality of the translation process, bringing us closer to making seamless translation possible,” Pino said. “In the future, we want to explore how this foundational model can enable new communication capabilities — ultimately bringing us closer to a world where everyone can be understood.”

Let’s hope humans aren’t left completely out of the loop in that future.