https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/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
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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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For that automation should be treated as a public resource rather than a private source of profits.
At a certain point automation becomes so efficient that it becomes unprofitable to produce certain goods because they can essentially be made for free. So then corporations don't invest in it and so it is no longer produced. It's already happened with other things, but this is somewhere where the public sector could step in.
It's tricky I don't know how it would be best regulated, but companies are run like totalitarian dictatorships. Large companies, especially public companies should be regulated to benefit the people and the workers. Right now publicly traded companies are incentivized legally to maximamize profit regardless if it's at the expense of employees, the environment and citizens. Maybe federally mandating a coop structure for businesses so businesses are run more democratically could be another solution.
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,...
lack of dragons
Speak for yourself, jeez! I'd gladly pick up a second job in exchange for dragons existing :P
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 have access to an emergency room in exchange for bankruptcy, and higher education is only attainable through a loan that rivals the size of a mortgage from 10 years ago.
Do you have access to clinics or family medicine?
Do you have access to community colleges and trade schools?
Quite frankly no, due to them being cost prohibitive. Myself and many others forego healthcare due to the bills we know we can't afford, thanks to obscenely high deductibles.
No, community colleges and trade schools are also prohibitively expensive for most people unless you take out a student loan that rivals what mortgages were just 10 years ago.
It's as if you don't go outside and touch grass, or talk to common people. I'm guessing we should just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, except we don't have socks, let alone shoes or boots with straps to even tug on. Fuck you're annoying.
"Do you have access? blah blah blah fucking blah I don't read shit or have a clue about what reality actually looks like"
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.
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.
It depends.
It could fizzle out a bit, harsh reality is that there are limitations, and those limitations are not trivial to push beyond. For example here they said the results were obviously bad, and the Spanish readers would switch to read English instead.
It could free up opportunities for sorts of work we couldn't previously have done and keep folks utilized.
We may run out of ambitions and end up with a glut of time and resources and give everyone better quality of living with less time lost to labor.
We may end up with a dystopia of people arbitrarily in the winning side enjoy a paradise and the rest suffer or rise up in desperation.
I'm looking at it from an angle of someone who sees the fuctional potential of the technology while being wary of the social repercussions. It may not cut it for now, but it's very possible that in a few years it will be passable enough for most low level work, and as much as may think little of that, there are always far more people employed in low level positions than higher ones.
It could free up opportunities for sorts of work we couldn’t previously have done and keep folks utilized.
What exactly?
This is an issue I see with the attitudes around it, this assumption that because previous technological advancements opened new opportunities, that this will be the same. What is not being considered is that this one is already primed to swallow those very same recent opportunities that were opened to us. There's already projects for coding AI, even. It's already approaching human-level capabilities.
Even if I try in good faith to imagine such a future, there is still the matter that, even if someone could start their own AI tech blog, their own AI art career, it doesn't mean there will be demand for that, especially because, assuming a capable AI, any single AI production will be far more productive. There will be less need for creatives behind AI. The needs of AI research will not need anywhere as many people as AI displaces either.
Even calling it "opportunities" seems like the wrong connotation because this is likely to displace people from careers that they were already passionate about. Even given a chance, many artists don't want to move into creating AI art, they want to make their own art. This is not freeing them, it's taking what they love away from them.
Ultimately, what is it that will make up for it? Are we just going to trust that something will show up, without any idea of what it is? Sounds unreliable. As much as you trust that because history turned out fine before it will again, I can't be reassured so easily. It turned out fine because humans had intellectual capabilities that early machinery couldn't handle. What if most people are left with nothing to move to. I don't trust history to play out the same, but I worry about something of it still. The early days of the Industrial Revolution had horrible exploitation and grueling working conditions. I dread to think what would be of the world if most people are left that desperate again.
The only way to prevent that would be a strong popular movement. Technology won't guarantee us a thriving future or we would have gotten that already. But united people can do it.
It's why I speculated different scenarios, we have to prepare for things to go various directions.
There's a chance that possibilities I can't imagine pop up. I suspect my imagination would have been too limited to see modern jobs if I lived in pre industrial times.
It's possible we ultimately run out of new stuff to do. Hopefully we can find a path to increase leisure rather than pointlessly keep people doing tedious work that we could automate because we couldn't think of a better system. There's tough issues around how to do it at all, and tougher, how to do it fairly.
If we get to such a future, I'd want to see reduction in hours worked per person, or some decoupling of livelihood from working. Way easier said than done though...
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.
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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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.
It's a little dance called capitalism:
this plus:
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.
My mother was a typist, her job was literally taking hand written papers and typing them on a typewriter. That was her whole job for some time.
Then she was “promoted” to operator.
Understandably, she would not have those jobs today. That’s progress.
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
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.