Next week’s headline will be something like, “Gizmodo readership drops 46% as garbled, incoherent, AI-generated content floods formerly-useful news website.”
Yeah. This isn’t taking jobs. This is Gizmodo deciding they no longer want a Spanish speaking audience.
500 words of gibberish and a picture of the next rumoured Apple product is all you need apparently
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/6GEWSNylwS8?si=_9rWi1Ixk3VxPPzr
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
More likey it reduces costs and seen as a win, even if there are a few errors from time to time. Translation in Spanish is quite good and easily at the level of only needing minor tweaks and review.
We write Spanish language review copy with a great detail on making it read well to Spanish according to the plain language act have happily become less burdened with the initial translations. These teams review context, legal, etc from multiple government partners and all of our stuff that gets translated is perfectly close to approved quality.
Capitalism is in a permanent prisoners dilemma.
Overall they need to treat their employees well so that there’s growth in the economy, since no one to buy things means no market to sell things. However, they can also choose to screw over their employees with bad pay, terrible conditions, or in this case, automating their workforce and firing people.
If no one screws their employees, the economy expands with modest growth.
If one or few corporations screw their workers while everyone else doesn’t, they become fabulously rich and the rest get outcompeted.
If everyone screws their workers, then the economy collapses because there’s no growth, and everyone eventually goes out of business.
It reminds me of the analysis of the recent tech layoffs, earlier this year. They made no sense from a rational, financial point of view. And most psychologists and anthropologists looked into it and theorize that most tech companies where probably doing layoffs because all the others were doing layoffs. Essentially trying desperately to not be undercut by competition who were shedding costs, despite they themselves having no reason to let employees go. Some insiders actually pointed out how many companies were simultaneously eliminating hundreds of roles, but also creating several other hundreds. Taking the opportunity of the overall employment market to restructure their workforce guilt free and hire without having to offer pay increases.
this is why I believe capitalism is unsustainable.
when I talk about automation and labor, no one seems to get it. Hey, if your job gets automated, you get fired. Have you even considered that you could do less labor for the same pay because your work got automated? they just look at me like my head’s been cut off.
Good news! Your workload has halved so you don’t have to work in to the evening!
Bad news… that means I only need half my current workforce now to work in to the evening and so you’re fired.
This whole thing is just stupid.
Did we get angry when computers cut accounting staff by 75% because one person and QuickBooks can do the job of a whole fleet of people? No. AI will change jobs in the same way computerization changed jobs. The same way the combine changed farming and the cotton gin changed textiles.
What we need to ACTUALLY BE WORRIED ABOUT is what we failed to be concerned with last time. The productivity increase and job elimination just went to the fucking top of the ladder. If that happens again we will have massive unemployment.
We need to tax the shit out of companies using AI to replace humans, and start setting up the infrastructure for the inevitable UBI that further automation will require.
Universal basic income, have AI and automated roles taxed as people. Self checkout? Well you still have the pay the tax as if that was an employee.
I disagree. We shouldn’t be disincentivizing innovation. Taxes on business and the wealthy should increase regardless of their use of automation.
A lot of it is only cost-cutting disguised as innovation though. Some jobs, like accounting, doesn’t really suffer from removing the human element, but compare that to the chatbot hellscape that customer service has become. We need to be VERY conscious of what we “innovate” and guide the development with taxation and laws.
I think it’s important that we call out its shortcomings, when common bugs plague the system (think llms with hallucinations) or make it act in unison compounding risk ( think the algo Aladin used by 90% of trading firms on Wall Street, causing similar assets pics and collusion while keeping the firms hands clean as they never communicated with each other, they just used a predicitve algo that chose the same positions, which should still count as collusion but i guess not when congress cant even figure out a web browser). There are certain repetitive acts in which ai will be wildly successful, but when it comes to enforcement we can’t just rely on ai as it can be exploited. Using it to cut down on creative work loads is helpful and allows for creating deeper art. Using ai to write out boiler plate code so a developer can focus on implementing business logic and security will vastly improve productivity. Where as using it for creating test scenarios will be futile as it only builds off its training data and new edge cases may never be caught. We need to define regulations on where AI can be used in commercial applications, and we need to do it ASAP.
Why not? There’s lots of stuff that could be considered innovation that is intentionally stifled due to competition laws or security concerns.
I don’t disagree with you entirely but if Walmart stopped employing 95% of their staff tomorrow due to self checkouts and stocking robots they should have to continue paying taxes for those roles because the newly unemployed will need government support.
The end game is universal basic income and that can only be sustainable with these types of policies.
There’s lots of stuff that could be considered innovation that is intentionally stifled due to competition laws or security concerns.
I agree that some innovation can be harmful. I guess what I meant was “we should avoid disincentivizing innovation unless necessary.” The way I see it, though, job lots from automation is both inevitable and fairly easy to fix (as you said, UBI), so there’s no reason to try to stop it from happening.
Really, I think automation should be encouraged. It frees people from usually-undesirable jobs and allows them time to pursue different careers or other interests. As long as we have ways to deal with the unemployment I think it’s a huge positive for people.
they should have to continue paying taxes for those roles because the newly unemployed will need government support.
I fully agree that there will need to be a tax increase to cover support for the newly-unemployed, but why not make that a general increase on businesses and wealthy individuals? If anything, this would be and incentive for automation as a way to decrease rising business costs.
Innovation has removed jobs before, and we dealt with it. I don’t see businesses being taxed for using computers instead of human calculators. I don’t see why this innovation is different.
Well I think we are both headed in the same direction and close to agreeing with one another, but with that said I don’t see it as a disincentive more so just a way to get the necessary costs from a company that is adapting. As for why not just increase taxes, yes do but you can do both. If a company is turning over millions and millions with only a few staff because everything is automated we should look at getting the value toward the exchequer that the automation replaced. Certain taxes go to certain funds, and employment taxes are different to corporate taxes. The costs associated with employment generally directly feed into social insurances etc. So it is important to keep that revenue stream active or social insurances would need more money from the general tax pool instead of getting it from employers.
As for why now and not before, we kissed out before and we are very much suffering as a result. Production has increased in orders of magnitude and wages have stagnated, we need to think differently and the sooner we evaluate these roles the sooner we can put a value on the automated service. It is a nebulous and difficult areasl to draw a line but that doesn’t mean a line isn’t required. And I get that not being able to perfectly explain why a cashier being replaced should be taxed but someone replaced by a calculator shouldn’t but the fact is regulations and laws have arbitrary basis, like minimum age to run for president and height to become an officer. The line had to be drawn so it was and we adapt to that.
I’m also no saying close the discussion forever, the President should be whoever gets the most votes full stop…provided they’re legitimate votes and the candidate isn’t actively standing trial for crimes committed in office.
Well, yeah, people did get angry. Just like when conveyor belts, weaving machines, and steam engines were introduced.
except that translation are not that good. I was going to post a rant about it but this article is more relevant.
chatbot, automated translation are plague and they allow companies to isolate themselves from the customers and cut the cost.
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.
Ads disguised as news stories.
The local editors can improve the quality of the translated articles, adding or modifying parts to appeal Spanish-speaking audience.
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?
deleted by creator
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
if y’all thought capitalism was bad, it’s just gonna get worse lol
I want to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Venture Capitalist Ride
Stop. Fighting. AI.
It’s a lost battle. Nobody at a country scale use going to put themselves at an economic disadvantage when the tech is already easily reproducible with little barrier to entry.
Headline should read:
“Software took my job, literally”
10 years ago I replaced an entire department with custom software that automated their jobs. The department did manual data entry into an ERP system, feeding it the manufacturing data from the previous day. We did not automate it to be evil, we did it because humans make lots of mistakes. If you ask the human, they definitely typed it correctly and it there is a problem it’s a computer “bug”.
Miraculously the automated system has made exactly 0 typing errors in 10 years.
This is exactly what I was thinking. People need to start understanding this and evolve to stay ahead of what jobs AI can now take. And also Spanish is a really easy language to learn, so I’m not surprised that a machine could perform the same task easily
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Former Gizmodo writer Matías S. Zavia publicly mentioned the layoffs, which took place via video call on August 29, in a social media post.
Earlier this summer, Gizmodo began publishing AI-generated articles in English without informing or involving its editorial staff.
The stories were found to contain multiple factual inaccuracies, leading the Gizmodo union to criticize the practice as unethical.
For Spanish-speaking audiences seeking news about science, technology, and Internet culture, the loss of original reporting from Gizmodo en Español is potentially a major blow.
Subtle errors, mistranslations, and lack of cultural knowledge can impair the quality of automatically translated content.
But with so many media companies chasing revenue through SEO manipulations and AI-written filler, it’s unlikely that we’ll see the end of this apparently cost-cutting AI trend soon.
The original article contains 523 words, the summary contains 129 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
While it is true that AI can replace a lot of personnel in certain jobs, it also makes it possible for the average person to use that same AI to start small businesses and compete with large corporations, various AI technology products are open to everyone it’s not like they only benefit large corporations.
Why are companies turning evil as they grow?
It’s a little dance called capitalism:
- Company becomes publicly traded.
- Shareholders invest in the company.
- The company aims to maximize profit.
- Growth eventually slows down because almost everyone who could use the company’s services already does.
- Shareholders expect returns on their investment.
- To increase revenue, the company must either raise prices for customers or reduce operating expenses.
this plus:
- For many companies the majority of operating expenses are related to employees, so they will try to resist raising wages, preferably cutting them and/or firing people (also, union busting)
- Product quality will suffer
- They’ll try to skirt regulations and lobby to overturn them
- In capitalism there’s no such thing as enough when it comes to ROI so we go back to 6.
Money. No such thing as “enough” when you’re a corporation.
They’ve always been this way.
Companies as entities have no conscience and aren’t subject to the same punishments as people.
If money is the sole driving factor then morality and ethics aren’t concerns unless they have a negative impact on the bottom line.
Since sociopaths are common and commonly get the highest positions in corporations, they will lead the company in the direction of most profit or growing stock price, with all other concerns as irrelevant.
If companies could enslave people they would make a lot more money and it is only law and the potential pushback affecting their profits that would give them pause. (See: the south pre 1860s, as well as numerous highly exploitative factories around the globe that made outsourcing so popular).
If they could kill people to make more money, overall, they would do so (see: insurance companies)
The more money a corporation has the better chance it has of bribing officials, buying favors, lobbying for favorable laws (or removing unfavorable ones), i.e. regulatory capture.
I haven’t put a ton of thought into this but I think corporations and the lack of legal ramifications of breaking the law are major failings in modern capitalism. If a corporation breaks the law it should be sentenced to “jail” where it basically can’t sell, buy, earn, etc during the sentence. In most cases that would destroy it. In extreme cases it should be executed (disbanded).
Another good point of distinction – they aren’t chasing the highest profits, they’re chasing the highest short term profits. There is no universe where the cost of a massive failure is less than the cost of proper safety measures for instance, but because the execs don’t care about the long run, they’ll cut safety for temporary profit. They aren’t running these companies to be sustainable, but to squeeze as much value out as quickly as they can.
It’s a giant fucking shame, because focusing on the long run would actually be way more employee and environmentally friendly.
deleted by creator
Ideally, she would be trained for a new job when those jobs went away. But we just let people suffer under capitalism.
If your mother’s employer switched from employing your mother to using a machine which accomplished the same task in an objectively worse, less-dependable way than your mother it would not have been progress.
The notion of progress is an ideological artifact used by oligarchs and imperialists to keep the poor rabble pliable and complacent with the modes of exploitation.
Yeah they used to have people whose whole job was to put documents in the file system, literally open a draw and put in a typed document. Computer was once a job title, literally just doing basic math all day like adding up columns of numbers. Factories used to be full of machinists who turned dials to set numbers in a sequence and repeated it all day…
The job market has done nothing but change and evolve, I don’t see why people suddenly want it to stop
AI was a mistake
Capitalism was a mistake. All of this is just its flaws being taken to its logical extreme.
AI being used to translate stuff isn’t a bad thing on its own, it’s not severely damaging the careers and in many cases the lives of educated people just because it exists. It does so in the context of this system which hasn’t really been working for a while and continues to fail. AI has its dangers regardless, for sure but it doesn’t necessarily have to spelll doom in all the ways it has been.
