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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Cool story bro

I want to get off Mr. Bones' Wild Venture Capitalist Ride

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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

It's a little dance called capitalism:

1. Company becomes publicly traded.
2. Shareholders invest in the company.
3. The company aims to maximize profit.
4. Growth eventually slows down because almost everyone who could use the company's services already does.
5. Shareholders expect returns on their investment.
6. To increase revenue, the company must either raise prices for customers or reduce operating expenses.

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).

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.