Does AI Really Speak Our Language?

Cognitive science professor Douglas Hofstadter unpacked some of the limits of deep learning–based translation in a feature published in The Atlantic in January. Hofstadter showed through examples how an AI translation system would miss some of the simplest concepts that a human translator would take for granted. For instance, any human reader would deduce that the following excerpt describes the house of a married couple: "In their house, everything comes in pairs.