Comment on “AI took my job, literally”—Gizmodo fires Spanish staff amid switch to AI translator

cloudless@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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

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    • doublejay1999@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Especially when it’s written in SEO-English which is frequently garbage in the first place.

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      • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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

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    • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I didn’t even think about the idioms. Excellent point.

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      • scottyjoe9@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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.

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  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Aren’t the English articles already written by an ai anyway? Doesn’t it make sense to have a more homogeneous chain of production?

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  • cloudless@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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      • elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Not to take away from your point, but even the English speaking world can have significant differences among its regions.

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    • lilShalom@lemmy.basedcount.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ads disguised as news stories.

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    • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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  • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah I get the feeling this will age like milk for the company.

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• coffeebiscuit@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yeah, but actually we want everything cheap an with maximum profits. So…

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  • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    When this inevitably backfires by having incredibly bad quality products, maybe we’ll see a new importance placed on expertise. I can dream, anyway.

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• masterairmagic@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Instead of 10 people you’ll need 1 person instead. Those 9 people will need to find a new gig.

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• echo64@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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

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  • cloudless@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I will say this if I were impacted by this. And I will learn to use AI as a tool for my advantage.

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• doublejay1999@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What a glib thing to say

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