Opinion Adults-only subtitles for children’s content are a problem. But it’s a miracle that such communication no-nos don’t happen more

Add this one to the expanding online archive of speech-to-text fails. It seems that children’s content on YouTube has a no-no word problem. The closed captions for several videos, which are provided by popular automatic speech recognition systems like Google Speech-To-Text and Amazon Transcribe, have been making R-rated replacements for innocuous words. So “corn” becomes “porn”, “beach” becomes “bitch” and “combo” becomes “condom”. This is not a problem if you’re a kid with an avid curiosity about the adult world, but it can be a meltdown-generating issue if you’re the parent of said curious child.

While the Luddite’s instinct would probably be to go pitchforking after the machine, it would be in order to remember that even the so-called superior intelligence of human beings has not been immune to similar errors. Internet users of a certain vintage will recall the early YouTuber known as Buffalax, infamous for slapping misheard English lyrics on non-English songs, such as the Tamil song “Kalluri Vaanil” which became “Benny Lava”. Or take the case of famously-misheard lyrics, such as, “In a Gadda da vida” by Iron Butterfly, which was originally “In the Garden of Eden”, but people continued to sing the nonsensical version.

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If anything, YouTube’s inappropriate subtitles highlight the astonishing phenomenon that is human communication. As Steven Pinker pointed out in The Language Instinct, the space separating one word from another in a spoken sentence is really only the listener’s “hallucination”. To then understand the meaning of those words — if separated as the speaker intended — comes down entirely to the listener’s knowledge of the language and the context in which the sentence is spoken. Listen to a sentence in an unfamiliar language and try to discern individual words to appreciate what an underrated miracle human speech is. A poor machine’s substitution of “I love corn” with adults-only words can then be laughed off.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on April 5, 2022 under the title ‘I love corn’.