Position paper: should machine translation be labelled as AI-generated content?

In September 2023, the Government of Canada issued a ‘Guide on the Use of Generative AI’ with recommendations for Canadian government institutions and their employees. As other similar documents published by various organizations in recent years, this document makes recommendations regarding transparency, stating that whenever generative AI is used to produce content, the reader should be informed that “messages addressed to them are generated by AI”. While this guide does not address specifically the case of machine translation, it does mention translation as a potential application of generative AI. Therefore, one question that naturally arises is: Should machine-translated texts be explicitly labelled as AI-generated content wherever they are used? In this position paper, we examine this question in detail, with the goal of proposing clear guidelines specifically regarding MT, not only for government institutions, but for anyone using MT technology to produce new versions of a text. Our main conclusion is that machine-translated text is indeed AI-generated content. As such, it should be explicitly marked everywhere it is used. We make recommendations as to what form this labelling might take. We also examine under what conditions labelling can be removed or omitted.