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“AI took my job, literally”—Gizmodo fires Spanish staff amid switch to AI translator
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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It makes sense for AI to do this kind of work.
But companies should hire editors to verify the results, including someone with local cultural knowledge.
Does it? They had people writing articles in Spanish, knowing their Spanish-speaking audience and what would appeal to them. Now it's just English articles translated into Spanish. Badly.
What?? You mean there's more to translating media than scraping together the literal translation of one language to another and calling it done??
Nah, those Spanish folks will totally get all the English idioms and phrasing they've likely never heard of, and will totally not be confused over the piss poor machine translation effort
Especially when it’s written in SEO-English which is frequently garbage in the first place.
Shit that's why AI generated articles seem to just be vomiting keywords. I didn't think it was possible for gaming journalism to get worse, but a bunch of nobody sites now have completely hilarious garbage articles
I didn't even think about the idioms. Excellent point.
To be fair, translation engines like deepl.com do handle idioms pretty well compared to google translate. It probably depends on the idiom and the languages though. But even deepl is nowhere near perfect. Fine for random stuff to be understood but not good for a professional news website.
Aren't the English articles already written by an ai anyway? Doesn't it make sense to have a more homogeneous chain of production?
Yeah I get the feeling this will age like milk for the company.
Gizmodo is a global tech news site, not a local news site. The majority of articles on the site are not region specific.
It makes sense to save costs by translating the articles instead of writing separate articles. The local editors can improve the quality of the translated articles, adding or modifying parts to appeal Spanish-speaking audience.
English is a region-specific language as much as Spanish is. A huge amount of the globe speaks Spanish and much of it shares a culture with significant differences from the English-speaking world and thus different interests.
Not to take away from your point, but even the English speaking world can have significant differences among its regions.
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That assumes those local editors will be given any time to take on that extra workload of sorting through whatever translational errors the AI has done.
Even if an AI accurately translates the article text word for wrord, literal translation does not often equal accurate translation.
Have you not been paying attention to AI over the last year? It can easily go beyond just translating word for word. This isn't Google Translate anymore.
How sure are you that idioms which don't even have good translations will be accurately translated by the AI? How sure are you that there won't be cultural misunderstandings which go beyond translation?
Yeah, I can tell you're not an Italian speaker. That's not the proper Italian idiom, lol.
The actual idiom is “osso duro de roer”, without the verb it is not the idiom. And no, it doesn't mean “tough cookie” in the same way that tough cookie is used in English. Nor does it mean Hard nut to crack either. Nuance is really lost with the technocrats, eh.
lol how are you gonna praise its language skills in a language YOU DONT SPEAK
What would be interesting to know is whether this would also work when translating the idiom as part of a larger text or if this only works when specifically prompted to translate a single idiom.
Yeah, but actually we want everything cheap an with maximum profits. So…
When this inevitably backfires by having incredibly bad quality products, maybe we'll see a new importance placed on expertise. I can dream, anyway.
Instead of 10 people you'll need 1 person instead. Those 9 people will need to find a new gig.
you wouldn't be saying this if you were impacted by this. ai translation is no where near at the same level as actual work done by localisers
I will say this if I were impacted by this. And I will learn to use AI as a tool for my advantage.
Are you sure about that? With the advances to AI in the last year, something like that seems trivial
yes, I am very sure, I work directly with this tech. It's very good at making something that looks impressive but falls apart with any level of scrutiny.
My favourite part right now is that AI doesn't actually translate, it is just constantly dreaming up text that looks like what you might expect, and it's trained on a model that hopefully will impact that text to make it be valid.
but it's often not, so it will hallucinate something totally untrue, or just absolutely made up and then make all the following text entirely about that thing. You might have some text about the fall of the soviet union. but the AI hallucinates the existence of a clown at some point because of some bias in the model maybe, now suddenly the fall of the soviet union was because of a vast clown plot.
Often it just gets totally screwed over by it's own biases, like counting. god forbid your input text has something to do with counting, the AI's will get stuck on counting things that don't exist on that kind of thing so easily
all of this absolutely misses the fact that all the nuance is lost and the institutional knowledge is lost too.
To be absolutely clear, the current state of AI is very good at fooling middle managers and decision makers that it is good, because it's built to look good. but it's not even 5% the quality that we can have real people do things. and there is a mountain to get it there.
My guess is that over the next few years content quality online is going to go to shit and that will negatively impact those companies and sectors that utilize AI foolishly.
Hopefully we enter Gartner's trough of disillusionment and companies back off from wholesale replacing humans with LLMs and recognize that in most cases they aren't fit for purpose.
I think AI will have to go (far?) beyond LLMs to have any chance of replacing humans artists and writers with output of somewhat reasonable quality. (I may be wrong; maybe it is simply a matter of training very topic-specific LLMs)
Meanwhile if the impact isn't sufficient the greedy and moronic will plow forward to the detriment of us all. Writers will struggle to support themselves and the Internet will become a lot less useful. It may be a very rough decade or two.
I'm hoping this'll lead to a refreshed appreciation of expertise
This could come only from someone who hasn't played around with any AI
Not at all, localization is very different from simple translation
What a glib thing to say