I just watched a video where the new Chat GPT-4o seamlessly translated a conversation between an Italian and English speaker. I know this isn’t the first tool to do this, but it’s the first time I’ve seen an example where I thought about how useful this is. It gave me the realization that instant language translation will revitalize diversity of language

In my travels, I’ve noticed that English is a language that is becoming more and more widespread. Not everyone knows English, but recently in both France and Spain I had far less challenges communicating compared to my travels to France 12 years earlier. I think this stems from a move towards everyone desiring to speak a common language. Want to be able to talk to people in most parts of the world? Learn English.

But maybe that desire will diminish now. If I get to speak in my mother tongue and someone who speaks English can hear a seamless translation, do I really need to learn English? Maybe in the future people will be less likely to pick up a new language? Will we see a slowdown in the acquisition of the English language?

While I think we’ll see this shift, it won’t be drastic. Yet I can see both positives and benefits to this. A positive is that people will be more likely to hold on to the language of their heritage. A negative could be that in countries with high immigration the effort to learn the country’s home language might be less desirable. While this won’t necessarily cause an issue communicating since these AI tools can help, it can potentially undermine the social fabric of the country.

And maybe that’s not as big a concern as I’m making it out to be?

Still, I’m excited about the ease with which I’ll be able to travel to countries where the primary language isn’t English. I look forward to having conversations I could not have previously had. Tools like this make almost every person in the entire world a possible acquaintance, colleague, and friend. That’s a pretty exciting thing to think about.

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As an aside, a lot of AI image creators still have issues with text, as the image accompanying this post demonstrates. This was my prompt: An English, Spanish, and French person sitting at a table, each saying “Good Morning” in their own language, in a speech bubble.