“AI took my job, literally”—Gizmodo fires Spanish staff amid switch to AI translator
Meanwhile, readers say that some AI-penned articles switch languages halfway through.
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
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.
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
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.
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
What a glib thing to say
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Cool story bro
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.
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:
this plus:
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.
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.
