I loosely used the term 'AI'. Most people don't exactly know what artificial intelligence is or how it works, so using the terms according to their definitions sometimes creates more confusion than clarity.

Of course translation tools like DeepL have always been based on machine learning. The difference is that a few years ago DeepL worked well and its home page wasn't filled with 'AI this' and 'AI that'. They seem to have transitioned from their old ML models to some of the newer LLMs. From my experience the translation quality is much worse than it used to be.

but the vast majority of end users are more neutral on the subject.

Not in the last 9 months or so. Even if people ignored everything else, data centers have been awful PR since that is only adding to the affordability crisis on people's energy bills. AI sentiment in the West has completely turned around in the last 2 years.

As an indie dev at the scale of "not even getting 100 dollar paychecks" , your audience for the few few dozen reviews (the most important) are more likely to be these niches who are looking to try smaller stuff. And who's more sensitive to slop than the mainstream. You gotta be careful with your PR, especially in your writing and art.

Bro even the rural chuds and soccer moms shit on AI here in magaland

That’s completely incorrect when it comes to gaming, especially the indie gaming scene. Every use of AI that has been found in an indie game has had a lot of controversy to it. Look at The Alters from last year for example. There’s a large enough amount of indie gamers that REALLY hate AI and WILL boycott a game over it. Those people are also usually the most open to new and weird indie games.

Yes, Google Translate has used neural networks for quite a while. Recently they've also switched it to using the same Gemini LLMs that they give you chat interfaces with, so it's pretty equivalent to using ChatGPT for translations. It's just another company's version of the same thing, wrapped in a translation interface.

For professional work - yes everyone should hire translators.

It's not an LLM IIRC (the deepl one at least, Google now uses gemini)

Edit: apparently Deepl has been converted to an LLM since some time

I know he means "without the use of LLMs.". That's the big thing being forced down People's throats that they don't like.

I doubt people are rebelling against reinforcement learning for physically based animations, or prediction engines to forecast the weather