AI: OMNOMNOM this salt is fucking delicious.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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Uranium salt? I hear it gives you extra strength. Or an extra arm. Whatever.
They’re just using AI to do their job more efficiently, what’s the problem?
At least with where AI is now, it's basically an incredible data compressor. My local copy of gemm4:31b takes up less than 50GB iirc, and I can retrieve information from the entire Internet with it without an internet connection.
Using an AI to train an AI is like taking a jpg of a jpg. You're going to lose information eventually. Hallucinations will become worse like in a game of telephone
I mean sure, you can 'retrieve information', with no way of knowing where the information came from, whether the source was accurate, or whether what you've retrieved is even remotely faithful to the source material. So basically you can't actually retrieve anything, because it's just mashing words together in a way that happens to sound correct most of the time.
That's the cost of compression. You lose the source material, so it may hallucinate a bit.
You can ask it to provide a source.
Sometimes it will.
Sometimes it will make one up.
Lossy compression with no internal mechanism for detecting information corruption.
We did it! Progress! Let's go back and show Claude Shannon!
"If these companies want quality data, then they should offer quality contracts," Alice continued. "Instead they're low-balling struggling people, employing them for the barest possible amount of time and tossing them aside as projects are finished with no warning."
Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Or minimum viable product for that price range, if you want to put it more fancy.
You get what you pay for.
My dad always corrects me to: you never get more than you pay for.
Good. Poison the well, fuck this toxic industry. Burst the bubble.
Here fucking here.
Fuck AI.
As a user that agreed to AI training data off my convos, I am doing my part.
Be the change and sign up for one of those services to help teach AI
This is very important. I'm in a situation where the work I used to do is supposed to be taken over by the shitrobot. On a job platform now 15% of the job offers are the original work, 85% is AI slop fixing in one way or another. This led me on a 2-year odyssey of trying manual work (too weak), being really poor (getting better at that), and finally deciding that if I'm forced to serve the shitrobot to avoid starving I'll serve it badly. Btw so far I've managed to avoid these jobs, may it remain so.
That said, if you are in need of a real human translator for tech or creative EN-DE projects do contact me, I'd be glad to keep doing work that makes sense!
For some time I worked for Microsoft on their Copilot AI (outsource, I did not know I was signing up to work for Microsoft).
I cannot tell you how many good translators Microsoft hires just to rate Copilot's responses in various languages. They often had interesting insights to share, but whenever I asked my managers where to put it, they said we don't care. It's just rated 1 to 5, and that's it. Nobody even cares about language-specific nuances.
Technically none of the translators are ever 'hired', let alone 'employed'. All the work is based on shit contracts through several proxies. Some people weren't even sure that they were doing work for Microsoft. Hell, as a junior manager even I never had contact with anybody from Microsoft. Only our seniors.
It's an overall incredibly depressing environment. Very knowledgeable and passionate people still try to do their jobs as well as possible and provide insightful feedback, despite the fact it's supposed to completely replace them. Only to be ignored and ghosted when a given language is deemed not worth the cost by microslop.
I was literally the only person who ever responded to translators labeled as no longer useful. Even though they still had their contracts active. And I know that, because several of them told me that. Nobody else bothered to even respond as people asked for any available jobs when struggling to make a living.
I went from mobile apps programmer to school bus driver. 100X happier even if I make 1/6 what I used to.
I saw a talk recently of somebody translating manuals for new medical devices. She said translating software is not helpful because it’s a very specific field and the devices are brand new. Maybe give it a try.
I absolutely despise morons who smugly pronounce language learning and translation work "solved", while at the same time not bothering to learn any language beside their native one. And most often not bothering to use that one well, as well. You can tell so easily they have no idea what they are missing out on.
I hope it's all going to end in style of tower of Babel event. I know that it won't, but hey.
Wish you the best for your field of work.
Language is in a peculiar decline these days - there's the process of English becoming the most badly spoken and written language ever, because all of us non-natives use it online and often also at work. Together with the inescapable avalanche of slop being churned out.
Also, language used to carry authority and this is getting lost for more and more people. We have been bombarded with advertising, propaganda, lies for many generations now and it's becoming stale. Longer texts used to carry more authority, now a topic can be communicated very precisely through a meme, and why not? For a translator I am getting awfully distrustful of words I'm afraid. I believe we are already standing right under the crumbling tower and will have to learn to communicate through shrugs and grunts. And again, why not?
language used to carry authority
That’s an interesting view, because one way I always looked at it was it became a gating function (in a negative way). Just like the rich raise the barrier to entry, I always thought that there were people who were dismissive of others because you couldn’t speak their language perfectly.
Coupled with the hundreds of unique languages (let alone dialects) it created artificial pockets and barriers of understanding and power.
I do understand some of the cultural nuances of specific languages, but overall having a single common language understood and used by everyone can help unite us globally, rather than keeping us siloed.
I absolutely despise morons who smugly pronounce language learning and translation work “solved”
Juu sammoo miäkkii uonny uatelna. Kaekkee hienoenta tämmöttiissä uonku eip nuo alakoritmit ja semmottet oekkeest uo mittee ees ratkassukkaa. Miä eilispäevänä justiinsa opinni etteep tekoviksut ossoo ees kunnolla murutehia kientöö, vaek kyl miä nii luulinni juu. Tämmöttii kup vähäsennii huastelloopi ni eip hyö siihe oekkee mittee osannukkaa virikata! Kuukkels tuo etteenki se suols aenaki iha pelekköö paskoo, ol ihap hauskoo kyl lukkoo ja naaraa.
Is this supposed to be a meta comment to show that machine translation can't help us read it?
Edit: If it is, well DeepL manages a pretty coherent translation:
Yeah, I feel the same way. All the fancy stuff in this field—those sub-rhythms and whatnot—aren’t really a solution at all. Just yesterday I learned that even the pros can’t always get the grammar right, even though I thought they could. I messed around with this a little, but I couldn’t really figure out how to make it work! That part at the beginning sounds like total crap, but it’s actually pretty funny to listen to and watch.
I'm guessing "sub-rhythm" should be "algorithm" and "pros" probably means software and not people. The last sentences could use some more context. But otherwise this sounds kinda logical.
Now Google Translate…
Yeah, I'm so sorry. All the fine things in this world, but those little things and the like, don't solve the problem. Yesterday, I just didn't study properly, I thought so. That's a little bit of a huastelloopi, and it's not good for you, but it's not a big deal! Kuukkels, that's why it's always fun to play with the balls, it's just fun to play with the balls and the girls.
…yeah.
Yes.
Yeah I've been thinking the same. The greatest thing about these is that those algorithms and whatnot haven't really even solved anything. Just yesterday I learned that fake/artificial-smarts can't even translate dialects correctly, even though I thought they could. If you talk something like this for a bit they weren't really able to answer that! Google especially was giving out complete shit, but it was pretty funny to read and laugh.
If it was unclear, the point is: pick a random finn from the street and they can translate that pretty much from word to word, even if they are from a complete different dialect speaking area, whereas even at best AI could give you only something towards it. I can only use obscure things, like this as an example, as I do not speak that many other languages, but if the languages do not have much written record online, they are not going to be properly translatable. We are still surprisingly far from not needing human translators.
//And yes, Google was hilariously shit. I managed to make couple normal sentences, without even trying, that it just gave up completely and did not translate at all, only removed some random letters.
Well, it is always fun to play with the balls and the girls.
Our company decided to build our own ai translation system because the human translators we've been hiring started using AI... Quality dropped immensely, trust is lost. CEOs don't feel like shopping around. So sad.
Here's the thing: human translators have been using 'AI' for over a decade. It used to be called machine translation, and for anything but the dumbest stuff it's a dumb idea, first nail in the coffin of translation. Translation agencies loved the shite, of course, because they could now pay a translator 0.05€ per word instead of 0.10€, arguing that now the same work took less time (it did, and also a lower quality translation was produced with a lot of costly bullshit software in the middle). The translators, as is to expect, hated it, but were forced to accept it or starve. We are now very slowly reaching the point where we are hired back as esteemed professionals after AI-caused communication mishaps and business fuckups keep piling up ...
Imho nothing wrong with AI use by professionals, as long as it's verified. That obviously wasn't the case.
I've heard of people leaving perplexity because the CTO is strongly encouraging devs to use AI vibe coding and not waste their time manually reviewing the code themselves. Sounds like a shit show.
reams of fresh inputs.
Thank your "journalists" who "graduated high school" for their interesting take on mass nouns.
oh man it had been 3.4 nanoseconds since the last ai slop post here on lemmy, thanks for posting!
The slop will continue until the bubble bursts.
How did they not see that coming? AI could have been a handy tool as a wingman handling small, repetitive tasks. Instead we get a giant mess that expensive and not terribly useful. To me it's like EVs. Which would have been great second around town cars until the infrastructure could catch up.
Would have been? EVs are exactly that. They're great. Ones with range can easily replace cars with internal combustion engines for most use-cases. Usually costs me about $5 a month to keep mine charged.
Fully agree on LLMs being expensive messes that aren't very useful, though.
Not the above poster, but I would say the cost. Modern EVs are designed to replace cars, and so cost the same or more, while being not quite as convenient for long trips.
We could have all had lightweight, city-speed but cheap, short-range EVs for a decade or two already if that was the approach taken. The battery requirements for 60kph and maybe 100km of range are super minimal, even before you go lighter. Like an order of magnitude smaller.
Might have worked if the street infra and laws allowed it. Would have been super tough to pull off at the start, and a lot of people lack the parking for two different vehicles. I do remember some companies trying these, but there's no where appropriate to drive them.
I feel like you are describing the Nissan Leaf. Bought one used in like 2017 for $12k and it could only do like 80 miles on a charge but that's more than enough to get to work and back. Cost about $1 of electricity per 100 miles (apologies for freedom units)