“Even a few words that change meaning could have a drastic impact on the way people consume the information,” said Sejin Paik, a doctoral candidate in digital journalism, human-computer interaction, and emerging media at Boston University.

Paik, who grew up speaking Korean, also pointed out that AI models are often trained from a Western point of view. The data that drives the translations filters languages through an English perspective, “which could result in misinterpretations of the other language,” she said. Amid this fast-changing landscape, “we need more diverse voices involved, more people thinking about the ethical concepts, how we best forecast the impact of this technology.”

Manrai pointed to other flaws in this nascent technology that must be addressed. For instance, AI sometimes invents sentences or phrases that are not in the original text, potentially creating false information — a phenomenon AI scientists call “hallucination” or “confabulation.”

Ching Wong, executive director of the Vietnamese Community Health Promotion Project at the University of California-San Francisco, has been translating health content from English into Vietnamese and Chinese for 30 years.

He provided examples of nuances in language that might confuse AI translation programs. Breast cancer, for instance, is called “chest cancer” in Chinese, he said.

And “you” has different meanings in Vietnamese, depending on a person’s ranking in the family and community. If a doctor uses “you” incorrectly with a patient, it could be offensive, Wong said.

But Ghaly emphasized that the opportunities outweigh the drawbacks. He said the state should “cultivate innovation” to help vulnerable populations gain greater access to care and resources.

And he was clear: “We will not replace humans.”

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This article was produced by KFF Health News , which publishes California Healthline , an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation .

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.