You don’t have to spend long on my blog to figure out that I default to being grumpy about generative AI, but if I’ve made one exception to that rule, it’s for Kagi Translate, which I’ve found to be a genuinely helpful machine translation tool—and to have some neat features that I haven’t found in its Google or DeepL equivalents.

It took me back a little bit tonight, then, when Kagi Translate straight up hallucinated something on me, in a way that I imagine wouldn’t be out of place for a more mainstream LLM (which I’ve never really used). Earlier today, while working on a paper for an upcoming conference, I was consulting a Jacques Ellul book I was about to cite, and I wanted to make sure that “genetic engineering” would be an accurate translation for his phrase « intervention génétique » (which could obviously also be rendered “genetic intervention,” but I’ve never heard that phrase in my life, so I’d prefer to go with a more well-known phrase if it’s accurate).

Je compte bientôt préparer un document professionnel en français. Il y a cinq ans, j’aurais demandé à quelqu’un de m’aider à corriger des erreurs. En 2025, par contre, je me demande si mes petites erreurs éventuelles feront preuve que j’ai tout écrit moi-même au lieu de me fier à l’IA.

This article provides good examples of how the efficacy and efficiency of a given technology is often less important than deeper questions of reliance and roles.