How stupid is machine translation? No common sense at all, none

Hiromi does it her way >>>上原ひろみ　即興でマイ・ウェイを神技演奏 https://t.co/NBhhIJ2nrJ via @YouTube

— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) August 16, 2018

So I tweeted a clip of an interview and performance by the Japanese pianist, Hiromi Uehara. The interview is in Japanese, a language I don't know, and the clip is labeled in Japanese. But I'd listened to the clip and figured out what was going on. She was asked to play a song, "My Way", a grandiloquent turkey which Frank Sinatra had made into a hit. She gigled, complied, and then, as any jazz musician would, proceeded to improvise.

So, when I posted the clip I added a short English preface to the Japanese, "Hiromi does it her way". Out of curiosity, when I saw my tweet, I asked for the translation Twitter offered. Not knowing any better, the computer also translated my bit of prefatory English, despite the fact that it was already in English, into "Hiromi do it her way". Why, I ask, why? Because it doesn't know any better.