Gizmodo Fires Spanish Staff Amid Switch To AI Translator (arstechnica.com) 65
Last week, Gizmodo's parent company G/O Media fired the staff of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Espanol and began replacing them with AI translations of English-language articles. "G/O Media's decision to eschew human writers for AI is part of a recent trend of media companies experimenting with AI tools as a way to maximize content output while minimizing human labor costs," reports Ars Technica. "However, the practice remains controversial within the broader journalism community." The Verge first reported the news. From the report: Previously, Gizmodo en Espanol had a small but dedicated team who wrote original content tailored specifically for Spanish-speaking readers, as well as producing translations of Gizmodo's English articles. The site represented Gizmodo's first foray into international markets when it launched in 2012 after being acquired from Guanabee. Newly published articles on the site now contain a link to the English version of the article and a disclaimer stating (via our translation from Google Translate), "This content has been automatically translated from the source material. Due to the nuances of machine translation, there may be slight differences. For the original version, click here."
So far, Gizmodo's pivot to AI translation hasn't gone smoothly. On social media site X, journalist and Gizmodo reader Victor Millan noted that some of the site's new articles abruptly switch from Spanish to English midway through, possibly due to glitches in the AI translation system. [...] For Spanish-speaking audiences seeking news about science, technology, and Internet culture, the loss of original reporting from Gizmodo en Espanol is potentially a major blow. And while AI translation technology has improved significantly over the past decade, experts say it still can't fully replace human translators. Subtle errors, mistranslations, and lack of cultural knowledge can impair the quality of automatically translated content.
So far, Gizmodo's pivot to AI translation hasn't gone smoothly. On social media site X, journalist and Gizmodo reader Victor Millan noted that some of the site's new articles abruptly switch from Spanish to English midway through, possibly due to glitches in the AI translation system. [...] For Spanish-speaking audiences seeking news about science, technology, and Internet culture, the loss of original reporting from Gizmodo en Espanol is potentially a major blow. And while AI translation technology has improved significantly over the past decade, experts say it still can't fully replace human translators. Subtle errors, mistranslations, and lack of cultural knowledge can impair the quality of automatically translated content.
AI Says (Score:1)
Humans must go!
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Re:AI Says (Score:4, Funny)
You've got it all wrong. It's Hasta la vista, baby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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"Se me chispoteó" - Chavo del Ocho
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Get the fuck outta my thread.
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Hmmm... https://www.google.com/search?q=literacy+rate+in+mexico+2023 [google.com] -> 95.25%
Well, if 95% isn't "most" I don't know what is.
So now we have established that you are:
Not a flattering track record, another-AC!
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Mexico's adult literacy rate reached 95.25% in 2021. [statista.com]
Nationally, over 20% of adult Americans have a literacy proficiency at or below Level 1. Adults in this range have difficulty using or understanding print materials. Those on the higher end of this category can perform simple tasks based on the information they read, but adults below Level 1 may only understand very basic vocabulary or be functionally illiterate. [wikipedia.org]
So good job being an ignorant racist dipshit while also wildly wrong in your ignorant dipshit r
I'm learning to deeply despise AI's champions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm learning to deeply despise AI's champions. (Score:5, Insightful)
it does work. their content generates traffic and ad impacts, which translates to profit which is all they care about. the thing is, it isn't really that good quality content but it turns out it doesn't even need to be. it still works for the desired effect, so it is a very rational decision to offload it to ai, and trying "simple" translation first is a sensible and prudent approach. there will be hiccups, like with any disruptive tech.
i do think at the very least there is a niche. this isn't being an "ai champion", this is just someone automating his/her business for good measure, probably to even survive.
now, is ai content really any good? time (and money) will tell. i would have my doubts but then i usually don't consume the kind of content the ai is competing with anyway so ... i don't really care. it just has to be good enough which here means "mediocre", not a very ambitious target. i think that the mere fact that such platforms exist and thrive is a failure of our education system, but whether that content is written by flesh and bone or a statistical function isn't really relevant in the big picture.
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Beating down customer expectations so badly that they're denied any practical alternative is not "working."
If it increases profits, it "works" for the only definition of "works" that matters.
And to the extent they get away with it and make money anyway, there's no incentive to improve either.
LLMs are improving by leaps and bounds. A year ago, most people had never heard of them. Today, they are changing entire industries. A year from now, they will be better.
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I'm making popcorn, want some?
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Re:I'm learning to deeply despise AI's champions. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's one thing to be oblivious to long-term implications, another to just ignore the fact that your shiny fundraising gimmick doesn't fucking work.
Neither does that sick employee who keeps bitching about pay raises and more time off during the weekday.
Greed in business is choosing to try out AI not because it's perfect, but because it's good enough. Good enough AI will be a metric fuckton cheaper than humans, which speaks directly to the only real metric Greed cares about.
We're right to despise them. Like they give a shit.
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You can state just as truthfully that a team of monkeys with typewriters is cheaper than a professional journalist, but the statement is irrelevant because what they produce is not journalism. Much of what AI is being deployed to produce fits all defining criteria for "counterfeiting."
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I despise them more for still claiming that "AI won't cost you your job!" while jobs are being cut like this.
What a strange journey for them (Score:3)
From the legitimate media days to the owner defying a court order to Hulk Hogan taking them down because Peter Thiel gave him a blank check. Peter Thiel took revenge because Gawker outed him while he was in Saudi Arabia. I liked the early days of Jalopnik, reading about bargain Mercedes V12s and following the development of bitcoin on Gizmodo. Today the sites are all advertising and slideshows.
Re:What a strange journey for them (Score:4, Insightful)
It all looks like a piece of the same pattern to me. In headline-ese, "Garbage site that destroyed its reputation with cruelly stupid clickbait destroys its workforce with cruelly stupid cost-cutting."
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To some equity investors that don't seem to know how to manage their content assets any better, that's milking, "the long tail" as far as they're concerned.
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From the legitimate media days to the owner defying a court order to Hulk Hogan taking them down because Peter Thiel gave him a blank check. Peter Thiel took revenge because Gawker outed him while he was in Saudi Arabia. I liked the early days of Jalopnik, reading about bargain Mercedes V12s and following the development of bitcoin on Gizmodo. Today the sites are all advertising and slideshows.
Yep, used to like Gizmodo in the olden days, before they became Applemodo. The UI redesign that lead to most of their traffic dropping off was the last straw for me. Same with Kotaku which was owned by Gawker at the time, a formerly good site ruined by advertising and clickbait.
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That's ok, wherever you went after you left those sites will follow them into the enshittification pit as they grow and need to "monetize" deeper to keep the VC bros handing them checks. Then you'll need to find new sites again.
Slash and burn CEOing (Score:3, Insightful)
Making sustainable profit is difficult. But slash and burn is known to work at least temporarily (sack people, costs go down so profits go up for a while...). So stock prices go up, "investors" sell and profit, CEO gives himself a bonus, uses golden parachute, takes a break and maybe does the same thing at a different company.
Of course stuff/"value" is often destroyed as a result...
Re:Slash and burn CEOing (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the problem with filling our companies with a bunch of short-term thinkers. They just want to create bubbles and then cash out before it bursts. Long-term viability does not factor in at all.
Re:Slash and burn CEOing (Score:4, Interesting)
Many companies are viewing the job markets and deciding they can trim some staff and recruit cheaper new hires if needed.
If a company lets two employees go and nothing changes then they assume they were over staffed. If they let another two go and customer complaints start to rise, then they assume they found the minimum staffing level and perhaps will recruit one new staff member to bring customer satisfaction back up.
Customer complaints are about the only metric that many of these companies pay attention to.
focus (Score:3)
I wonder how hard it would be to change one word in the AI view of the Spanish language. Maybe focus on a relatively rarely used word or phrase and publish consistent bogus translations in places that AI would look for sample (eg. copyrighted material etc.)
I Imagine the Colbert nation could muster enough crowd to alter the translation of, say. "Uranus" to "Colbert" and wreak havoc in the astrology and astronomy media.
Re:focus (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how hard it would be to change one word in the AI view of the Spanish language. Maybe focus on a relatively rarely used word or phrase and publish consistent bogus translations in places that AI would look for sample (eg. copyrighted material etc.)
As someone who speaks Spanish as a second language (terribly), machine translations are already inconsistent and produce huge amounts of bogus translations. Any form of nuance is lost, variation in regional dialects and not to mention ambiguous meanings in English. I.E. Google Translate still translates "bitch" as literally meaning a female canine (perra), rather than the colloquial meaning (which is puto/puta in Spanish as I'm sure we all know). "how to pick up chicks" will often lead to literal instructions on how to lift a baby chicken. This is long before we get to slang.
Machine translation is good for literal translation like "what time is the next train to Madrid" or "where is the bank" but not for any form of writing that conveys nuance, impressions or emotions. That being said, if even if Gawker's writing has improved measurably in the last 10 odd years, I suspect machine translation couldn't butcher it any more.
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I wonder how hard it would be to change one word in the AI view of the Spanish language. Maybe focus on a relatively rarely used word or phrase and publish consistent bogus translations in places that AI would look for sample (eg. copyrighted material etc.)
As someone who speaks Spanish as a second language (terribly), machine translations are already inconsistent and produce huge amounts of bogus translations. Any form of nuance is lost, variation in regional dialects and not to mention ambiguous meanings in English. I.E. Google Translate still translates "bitch" as literally meaning a female canine (perra), rather than the colloquial meaning (which is puto/puta in Spanish as I'm sure we all know). "how to pick up chicks" will often lead to literal instructions on how to lift a baby chicken. This is long before we get to slang. Machine translation is good for literal translation like "what time is the next train to Madrid" or "where is the bank" but not for any form of writing that conveys nuance, impressions or emotions. That being said, if even if Gawker's writing has improved measurably in the last 10 odd years, I suspect machine translation couldn't butcher it any more.
Yep. Spanish speaker here. This is a correct observation.
AI systems are already vulnerable to hallucinations, so this is bound to cause a crapload of badly translated text being published.
I could see AI translators assisting a team of translators that do the proofreading. But to replace an entire team, that's just a recipe for disaster. Who is going to do the proofreading to catch up "hallucinations"?
No one, I guess. And if the material is indeed poorly translated, this will likely lead to plunging nu
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I wonder how hard it would be to change one word in the AI view of the Spanish language. Maybe focus on a relatively rarely used word or phrase and publish consistent bogus translations in places that AI would look for sample (eg. copyrighted material etc.)
As someone who speaks Spanish as a second language (terribly), machine translations are already inconsistent and produce huge amounts of bogus translations. Any form of nuance is lost, variation in regional dialects and not to mention ambiguous meanings in English. I.E. Google Translate still translates "bitch" as literally meaning a female canine (perra), rather than the colloquial meaning (which is puto/puta in Spanish as I'm sure we all know). "how to pick up chicks" will often lead to literal instructions on how to lift a baby chicken. This is long before we get to slang.
I think, like humour, this is going to be one of the harder things for AI to handle.
The big problem with both is a lot of the meaning is based on external content.
For humour, this clip is actually a great example [youtube.com]. To give a minor spoiler at the start of the bit a complete dud of a joke is told, and then at the end of the bit an almost identical joke absolutely kills. The difference isn't in the joke itself but the context offered by the rest of the bit.
Even if you told an LLM which joke worked it's going to
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One huge problem is it being nearly context free. Such as, a site discussing something that has areas, districts, regions, and zones. These could all be translated to the same term, one isn't inherently larger or inclusive of the other. Maybe it gets consistency on a single page, but across the entire site? Would it matter if in one spot I rearranged the order, would this change the mapping of these words to their foreign counterparts?
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I wonder how hard it would be to change one word in the AI view of the Spanish language. Maybe focus on a relatively rarely used word or phrase and publish consistent bogus translations in places that AI would look for sample (eg. copyrighted material etc.)
I Imagine the Colbert nation could muster enough crowd to alter the translation of, say. "Uranus" to "Colbert" and wreak havoc in the astrology and astronomy media.
Very difficult. This isn't like google bombing, I don't know where they're getting their source material from, but there's going to be a lot of it and it will be very dispersed.
There's going to be English / Spanish versions of the same webpage, English / Spanish versions of the same book, etc, etc.
Birbmodo (Score:4, Informative)
The current headline on Gizmodo is: Award Winning Bird Images Are the Best Thing You’ll See All Day
Let's be honest here: Nothing of value was lost.
Ay Carumba! Que horrible, mis amigos (Score:2)
Vaya con Dios, mis compadres de Gizmodo. Y buena suerte.
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Yo no soy Gizmodo, soy capitan, soy capitan.
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"Ay Carumba! Que horrible, mis amigos " translates to "Oh my! How horrible, my friends."
In the context of my knowledge, the phrase "Ay Carumba! Que horrible, mis amigos" could be used in a variety of situations. It could be used to express shock at a news event, sadness at a loss, or frustration at a situation.
"Vaya con Dios, mis compadres de Gizmodo. Y buena suerte." translates to "Go with God, my friends from Gizmodo. And good luck."
The phrase is a farewell phrase that wishes the Gizmodo staff good luck i
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My Spanish is very rusty, so I stuck with simple phrases. But Bard translated them well.
Giz-who? (Score:1)
I thought they went the way of Compuserve, AOL, and MySpace. Guess it’s still a year or two before that still.
Great...Engrish-grade Spanish :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever see those Amazon listings for sketchy Chinese-made products that have dozens of subtle grammar errors and are sometimes quite confusing and incomprehensible?...on rare occasion, they're even outright fraudulent because they accidentally state capabilities a product doesn't have...which looks like translation errors or typos, (think not-dishwasher safe or Apple certified as examples). I think we'll see something similar with all of these articles.
Remember, a human being that studied English in school and probably listens to English language pop music and watches English language movies fucked up those articles...plus there's a TON of English speakers worldwide for them to practice with. I am skeptical an AI can beat them.
Your SJW nonsense is giving us liberals a bad rep. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever see those Amazon listings for sketchy Chinese-made products
As opposed to those genuine products, also Chinese-made, but let's ignore those - we have to maintain racial confirmation bias somehow.
Genuine products hire locals to write copy. Genuine products worry about being sued, so have their devices certified by the UL or other safety organizations. They certainly worry about their reputation and don't want to advertise capabilities their products can't deliver. You can generally assume Anker, Apple, and Belkin wouldn't sell a 30w cable and say it can support 240w. Some Ali-Express and Temu-grade clones do. You can generally assume Chinese-made coleman camping chairs support their stated load....a knockoff chair from a company you've never heard of?...probably doesn't support 250lbs...especially when it's shipping weight is half of the product it's cloning. Why do they do this?...because you're not going to return a $3 cable or a $10 chair...and most users don't know or care.
However, you knew this already. We could pretend that non-Chinese low-end clones are sold on Temu, AliExpress, and Amazon...would that justify your self-righteous smugness? Tone it down, dude...you're giving the rest of us liberals a bad name.
Re:Your SJW nonsense is giving us liberals a bad r (Score:4, Insightful)
He does assume the branded items (Coleman was his example brand) have their products made in China. But he assumes they have better specifications for the product, leading to higher costs and thus higher prices. He assumes that cheap knock-offs will have lower costs and lower prices that are enabled by lower quality, not just lack of branding.
It helps to read the whole comment you are responding to!
I'm not white, dude. :) (Score:2)
I guess only white guys like you are allowed to be liberal. Us non-white liberals have to submit ourselves to your racial stereotyping because white liberals have the privilege for being on the "correct side".
Shit...I'm white?...When the fuck did that happen? Wow, according to you, I'm not only racist for correctly identifying the country of origin for most knockoff sold on Amazon and 2 Chinese-owned sites, but apparently I'm eligible for white privilege now!!!! Is it as good as everyone says? Thank you for assigning me a new race, all-wise-one!
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Ever see those Amazon listings for sketchy Chinese-made products that have dozens of subtle grammar errors and are sometimes quite confusing and incomprehensible?...on rare occasion, they're even outright fraudulent because they accidentally state capabilities a product doesn't have...which looks like translation errors or typos, (think not-dishwasher safe or Apple certified as examples). I think we'll see something similar with all of these articles.
Good, now you understand the pain of Asians buying stuff from US or Europe that only comes with English manual or very poorly translated manuals. Their only choice is to either learn English or find someone fluent in English to help them.
We may live to a day when your choice is to either learn Chinese or find someone who do to help you buy stuff from China.
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Maybe make it all original content. (Score:3)
I wonder what comes out worse: an AI trying to translate human-written articles to Spanish, or an AI writing original articles in Spanish itself.
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I wonder what comes out worse: an AI trying to translate human-written articles to Spanish, or an AI writing original articles in Spanish itself.
An AI writing original articles in Spanish which a different AI then translates into English and posts on Gizmodo.
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I wonder what comes out worse: an AI trying to translate human-written articles to Spanish, or an AI writing original articles in Spanish itself.
An AI writing original articles in Spanish which a different AI then translates into English and posts on Gizmodo.
Probably the original generated content would be better, as it doesn't have constraints on what to create and this can write an internally consistent hallucination from whatever works are most likely, which are the most linguistically accurate.
The translation is restricted to finding the words that most likely resemble the words in the original article, which is a much smaller subset of the generation space.
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Quality of translated content (Score:1, Troll)
It notes at the end that many factors of AI translation can impair the "quality of translated content".
Well who among you can say that much Gizmodo content was even of any quality to begin with? If the source material is already poor is it such a loss if the translation makes it a bit worse.
I would sure hope that if you were a spanish speaker seeking out technical news there would be many better sources than Gizmodo even back when they had real translators!
They've just jumped the Gawker (Score:2)
They're obviously interested in reducing the quality of so-called "journalism" from exploiting the cheapest, know-nothing copywriters* they can find to actual fact-free bullshit generated by AI devoid research and critical thinking. There's a good chance they're doing this to intentionally fail and then hire cheaper hacks in India or Bangladesh to conceal the fact that they're outsourcing.
* Calling copywriters paid by the piece "journalists" is a stretch.
This comment was written by ChatGPT 3.5.3-rc0438
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You act as if modern "journalism" isn't already fact-free bullshit. That horse left the barn over 20 years ago when news divisions became profit centers instead of cost centers which is what real investigation requires. Real investigative journalism is expensive and can't be expected to turn a profit.
Always let the USER decide to opt into machine tra (Score:2)
If Spanish speakers want a machine translated version of the site, they're quite capable of feeding it to a machine translator themselves. You can even make it easy for them, with buttons and whatnot.
But when you feed them MT without asking, a lot of the time they have to mentally translate borked translations back into English, just to understand what the author was trying to say. In terms of conveying what the writer was trying to say, all translations (but especially MT) can ONLY do worse than the origin
How to diss yourself, your own staff and customers (Score:1)
We're replacing you with an elaborate shell script because our customers can't tell the difference. It's an admission that Gizmodo is basically a bot farm.
which do you prefer (Score:1)
1) written by human, translated to dozens of languages by ai
Or
2) written entirely by ai in every language ...because those are your two real choices.
If you Speak English as well as Spanish... (Score:2)
Don't bother with the badly translated Spanish site, there is no original content there ...
Which means they have just lost all users ...
They're already doing this for English (Score:2)
There are tons of groups and pages on Facebook already doing this. Many times they are pages dedicated to pets or animals. The description of the group will usually say "Based in India". And all they are doing is using AI to recycle and translate content. And the translations to English are *bad*. In many cases damn near unreadable.
And we're going to see more of it. As someone said earlier, the content generally sucks grammar wise. But it's "good enough" that people muddle through it and provide ad r
Not just bad, but also dumb (Score:2)
So lets play greedy CEO wanting to gut the journalism staff and leverage AI.
You can:
a) Do what this CEO did, fire everyone and replace it with error prone AI.
or
b) Fire most people, but keep on a skeleton crew to supervise & correct the AI translation, and maybe do a little bit of original reporting (if it draws enough audience).
That the CEO thinks they can just pump out unchecked machine translation and have acceptable content is beyond me.
Like why not have the Spanish site open straight into google tra [translate.goog]