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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
if y’all thought capitalism was bad, it’s just gonna get worse lol
Next week’s headline will be something like, “Gizmodo readership drops 46% as garbled, incoherent, AI-generated content floods formerly-useful news website.”
500 words of gibberish and a picture of the next rumoured Apple product is all you need apparently
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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.
