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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
What we are seeing is very similar to what it must have been like for folks seeing machines take over and greatly simplify labor intensive tasks during the Industrial Revolution. Textile mills moved from hundreds of laborers making cloth on hand driven looms to machines churning out fabrics at a blistering pace. The short term effect was a major problem for those laborers who were displaced with a long term effect of creating a more efficient economy, with cheaper products for everyone and most people benefiting from a higher standard of living.
This sort of disruption happened again as computers took off. The Digital Revolution displaced many office workers. Many manual processes were replaced with digital sensors, switches and machines. For example, it was no longer necessary to have huge floors in an office building where typists manually copied documents. Again, a large number of workers suffered a major short term impact, but the long term outcome has been a net positive for society.
And things got disrupted again with the rise of the internet. Having lived through this one personally, the echoes of it are quite clear. The Internet disrupted a lot of existing systems. The rise of internet commerce was the death knell of brick and mortar businesses. The Internet was going to replace everything from banking to schooling. And ya, it caused a lot of job loss at all the stores it drove out of business. And it did drive stores out of business and continues to do so.
I suspect that, in 50 years or so, we’ll look back at this time as the beginning of the “AI Revolution”, and see it as an overall net positive. That isn’t to say that there won’t be people negatively impacted by the change. Writers and artists are very obvious casualties. Many other workers will find their jobs affected by AI as well. However, it’s also worth noting that we are nowhere near strong, general purpose AI. And what AI is likely to become, for now, is a tool to increase the productivity of professionals. It will mean that fewer people are needed to perform a task. But, there will still be a need for people to oversee the and direct the AI. The Industrial Revolution wasn’t the end of the world, neither was the Digital Revolution or the Internet Revolution. The AI Revolution won’t be the end of the world either.
I suspect that, in 50 years or so, we’ll look back at this time as the beginning of the “AI Revolution”, and see it as an overall net positive.
For the wealthy, yes. Investors love having less mouths to feed.
Writers and artists are very obvious casualties. Many other workers will find their jobs affected by AI as well. However, it’s also worth noting that we are nowhere near strong, general purpose AI.
That’s part of the problem. We’ll be lowering our standards to accept whatever formulated method of culture experience gets spoon fed to us, while true art goes by the wayside, along with creativity. Granted that’s already happening in many entertainment industries, this just further accelerates the fad-chasing and reduces the set of levers that executives have to just tweaking formulas until the audiences match with their wallets. A true AGI might have an inkling or spark of creativity versus the formulaic results you get from model driven AI.
And what AI is likely to become, for now, is a tool to increase the productivity of professionals. It will mean that fewer people are needed to perform a task. But, there will still be a need for people to oversee the and direct the AI.
Fewer people, meanwhile our population continues to increase. That means housing and healthcare continue in the trajectory of being less accessible to the majority.
The Industrial Revolution wasn’t the end of the world, neither was the Digital Revolution or the Internet Revolution. The AI Revolution won’t be the end of the world either.
I have to say, I disagree. The end of the world doesn’t come abruptly but in the form of a slow decline. I look around at young people who go into horrendous debt for a higher education that doesn’t even benefit them, which then delays the timeframe they can start house shopping, only to find a housing market that’s beyond the reach of even some of our most highly paid professionals. I see articles like “why 125k isn’t enough anymore” and then the concepts of being “financially sound” being around 3 times higher than what people actually make.
I look at what you wrote and I’d love to believe in an optimistic future where this elevates us further out of the mundane and makes time for more creative endeavors and satisfying healthy work, but I instead see a bleak future with less opportunity and a higher dependence on public assistance programs for the majority just to get by.
Automation doesn’t necessarily mean a better quality of life. We’re fatter than ever, more depressed than ever, and we still work more than a medieval peasant.
I always bring this up, automation is what made slavery profitable in the south. When the cotton gin was invented slaveowners didn’t start using less slaves for the same out put of cotton. They started buying more slaves to increase the output of cotton with a higher profit margin. That’s what happens anytime we see a new form of automation, companies don’t reduce work hours and keep the pay the same, they try to increase production and the workers that were replaced will be made to do some other menial task machines can’t do, and they will also be made to work 40hrs a week. This whole automation thing increasing our quality of life is a total fucking myth.
This notion that medevil peasants worked less and were somehow better off is ridiculous. I’d gladly work an extra 20 hours a week for indoor plumbing, electricity, cars, cell phones, modern medical care, education, lack of dragons,…
modern medical care, education
The wealthy have done a fantastic job of taking those away, along with social security and retirement. Be clear, your plumbing, electricity, cars, and cell phones are absolutely on the chopping block as the gap gets wider.
I sort of agree in that the fruits of automation shoud be distributed through government and taxes. Its cool that things get more efficient and the world isnt a zero sum game anymore, but if everything in exess of that zero goes to only a few people things won’t get better for everyone.
Better policy is definitely needed. We could be living in a utopia right now working three days a week.
The industrial revolution and adoption of computers also introduced a ton of new jobs. We haven’t seen any evidence of this happening with AI. AI will eventually come for all of us, it needs to either be curtailed, which is unrealistic and stifling, or we will need to radically shift our economy, which is even more unrealistic. The only other option is collapse. AI has been eating jobs behind the scenes for years without anyone noticing, and there has been no comparable expansion of new jobs like previous revolutions. This was all true ages before the current controversy.
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Biggest difference between this and the industrial revolution and general automation is that education used to be your saving grace. This person could’ve been fluent in 10 languages and AI would still replace them.
This is such an important point that AI advocates keep glossing over. It’s not even like there is an amount of education that will make up for it. All intellectual work is in line for being automated.
Automation that lets people go from tilling farmland to writing about what they are passionate for was (mostly) great. Some may mourn the loss of artisan crafts but the net result was positive. Automation that takes people from their writing jobs is not so great. Where are they supposed to go to now? To AI? They don’t own the platform, it’s not gonna get them a living wage. How are they supposed to afford this “cheaper stuff” with no money? Do they even want to go to AI if they even had the chance? Many people who work on writing and art would like to just be able to keep at it.
It’s easy and optimistic to expect that because it turned out well before it might do so again, but think of what the invention of automobiles meant for the horse population. While I doubt humans would go away so easily, with the automation of writing, arts, customer service, coding, we might be driven into sweatshop jobs rather than benefit in any way. Unable to outperform AI, many people will have to undercut machinery instead. What a future would that be…
The short term effect was a major problem for those laborers who were displaced with a long term effect of creating a more efficient economy, with cheaper products for everyone and most people benefiting from a higher standard of living.
This first part is very understated on retellings. The major problems were not limited to displaced laborers, but also the rising industrialist class which took advantage to them to the extent we had a phase of child workers getting their limbs crushed by machinery and then discarded. The higher standards of living relied greatly on fierce efforts from labor movements to guarantee basic rights and dignity for the workers and their families.
It also comes to mind that for all the wonders of the internet, a lot of people had a better conditions working in brick and mortar stores than they now do in the infamous Amazon warehouses. Maybe we are falling short on this side of progress.
Your comment got me thinking. I think it’s time for tech workers to start unionizing. Getting ahead of the curve before we get replaced in 10 years.
I hope you’re right. Something about the scope and type of change we’re seeing here feels quite different. It can be mistake too to assume that things will go the way they usually have. I wouldn’t advise anyone to be complacent. We had to have something close to a second civil war in the US to get things like an 8 hour day.
It will absolutely be a net positive for everyone above a certain socio-economic threshold. It will also leave everyone below that threshold behind, but it will be a minority of people who, I suspect, will be largely made up of minorities and already marginalized people increasing the divide. But history will look back kindly regardless. Because that’s how history works.
A minority? Advancements in AI could lead to extensive automation in the service industries and desk jobs everywhere, which is what makes up for most of the jobs today.
If history will look back kindly, it’s mostly for the whole “written by the victors”, but what that will mean for us living through it might be very different. With people already struggling with costs of living, I wouldn’t put most people in the threshold of a net positive outcome. Not unless drastic sociopolitical changes take place, at the very least.
Technology is great, but greed corrupts everything. Since the US has gone all-in on greed, we don’t even bother trying to help workers displaced by technology, while the majority of the benefits accrue to a tiny minority of people—mainly just big investors, and to a lesser degree the workers putting technology into practice.
In the longer term, technology mixed with capitalism contributes greatly to wealth inequality, and it creates companies so powerful they become above the law. For example, look at the fossil fuel industry, which has taken on a life of its own and seems to be on track to kill us all, and has definitely done a lot to stifle the adoption of renewable energy while propping up dictatorships in oil-producing countries. Look at plastic manufacturers who are filling the world with toxic garbage for profit. Or look at the automotive industry and how in the US it has shaped the design of whole cities, prevented adoption of mass transit, and even gotten existing mass transit systems dismantled.
I’m a technology worker myself so of course I see it as a worthwhile endeavor, but even I can see that the way we manage the adoption of new technology is incredibly destructive.
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
