This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"If these companies want quality data, then they should offer quality contracts," Alice continued. "Instead they're low-balling struggling people, employing them for the barest possible amount of time and tossing them aside as projects are finished with no warning."
Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Or minimum viable product for that price range, if you want to put it more fancy.
You get what you pay for.
My dad always corrects me to: you never get more than you pay for.
Good. Poison the well, fuck this toxic industry. Burst the bubble.
Here fucking here.
Fuck AI.
Lol agree, but it's "hear", like "listen to this"
As a user that agreed to AI training data off my convos, I am doing my part.
That's fine, so long as your part involves poisoning the data purple monkey dishwasher.
Be the change and sign up for one of those services to help teach AI
They’re just using AI to do their job more efficiently, what’s the problem?
At least with where AI is now, it's basically an incredible data compressor. My local copy of gemm4:31b takes up less than 50GB iirc, and I can retrieve information from the entire Internet with it without an internet connection.
Using an AI to train an AI is like taking a jpg of a jpg. You're going to lose information eventually. Hallucinations will become worse like in a game of telephone
I mean sure, you can 'retrieve information', with no way of knowing where the information came from, whether the source was accurate, or whether what you've retrieved is even remotely faithful to the source material. So basically you can't actually retrieve anything, because it's just mashing words together in a way that happens to sound correct most of the time.
You can ask it to provide a source.
Sometimes it will.
Sometimes it will make one up.
It will always make one up. Sometimes it may get lucky and the made up one exists and is relevant, but it still just made it up.
That's the cost of compression. You lose the source material, so it may hallucinate a bit.
Lossy compression with no internal mechanism for detecting information corruption.
We did it! Progress! Let's go back and show Claude Shannon!
This is very important. I'm in a situation where the work I used to do is supposed to be taken over by the shitrobot. On a job platform now 15% of the job offers are the original work, 85% is AI slop fixing in one way or another. This led me on a 2-year odyssey of trying manual work (too weak), being really poor (getting better at that), and finally deciding that if I'm forced to serve the shitrobot to avoid starving I'll serve it badly. Btw so far I've managed to avoid these jobs, may it remain so.
That said, if you are in need of a real human translator for tech or creative EN-DE projects do contact me, I'd be glad to keep doing work that makes sense!
I absolutely despise morons who smugly pronounce language learning and translation work "solved", while at the same not bothering to learn any language beside their native one. And most often not bothering to use that one well, as well. You can tell so easily they have no idea what they are missing outol on.
I hope it's all going to end in style of tower of Babel event. I know that it won't, but hey.
Wish you the best for your field of work.
Language is in a peculiar decline these days - there's the process of English becoming the most badly spoken and written language ever, because all of us non-natives use it online and often also at work. Together with the inescapable avalanche of slop being churned out.
Also, language used to carry authority and this is getting lost for more and more people. We have been bombarded with advertising, propaganda, lies for many generations now and it's becoming stale. Longer texts used to carry more authority, now a topic can be communicated very precisely through a meme, and why not? For a translator I am getting awfully distrustful of words I'm afraid. I believe we are already standing right under the crumbling tower and will have to learn to communicate through shrugs and grunts. And again, why not?
language used to carry authority
That’s an interesting view, because one way I always looked at it was it became a gating function (in a negative way). Just like the rich raise the barrier to entry, I always thought that there were people who were dismissive of others because you couldn’t speak their language perfectly.
Coupled with the hundreds of unique languages (let alone dialects) it created artificial pockets and barriers of understanding and power.
I do understand some of the cultural nuances of specific languages, but overall having a single common language understood and used by everyone can help unite us globally, rather than keeping us siloed.
I went from mobile apps programmer to school bus driver. 100X happier even if I make 1/6 what I used to.
For some time I worked for Microsoft on their Copilot AI (outsource, I did not know I was signing up to work for Microsoft).
I cannot tell you how many good translators Microsoft hires just to rate Copilot's responses in various languages. They often had interesting insights to share, but whenever I asked my managers where to put it, they said we don't care. It's just rated 1 to 5, and that's it. Nobody even cares about language-specific nuances.
Technically none of the translators are ever 'hired', let alone 'employed'. All the work is based on shit contracts through several proxies. Some people weren't even sure that they were doing work for Microsoft. Hell, as a junior manager even I never had contact with anybody from Microsoft. Only our seniors.
It's an overall incredibly depressing environment. Very knowledgeable and passionate people still try to do their jobs as well as possible and provide insightful feedback, despite the fact it's supposed to completely replace them. Only to be ignored and ghosted when a given language is deemed not worth the cost by microslop.
I was literally the only person who ever responded to translators labeled as no longer useful. Even though they still had their contracts active. And I know that, because several of them told me that. Nobody else bothered to even respond as people asked for any available jobs when struggling to make a living.
I saw a talk recently of somebody translating manuals for new medical devices. She said translating software is not helpful because it’s a very specific field and the devices are brand new. Maybe give it a try.
Our company decided to build our own ai translation system because the human translators we've been hiring started using AI... Quality dropped immensely, trust is lost. CEOs don't feel like shopping around. So sad.
Here's the thing: human translators have been using 'AI' for over a decade. It used to be called machine translation, and for anything but the dumbest stuff it's a dumb idea, first nail in the coffin of translation. Translation agencies loved the shite, of course, because they could now pay a translator 0.05€ per word instead of 0.10€, arguing that now the same work took less time (it did, and also a lower quality translation was produced with a lot of costly bullshit software in the middle). The translators, as is to expect, hated it, but were forced to accept it or starve. We are now very slowly reaching the point where we are hired back as esteemed professionals after AI-caused communication mishaps and business fuckups keep piling up ...
Imho nothing wrong with AI use by professionals, as long as it's verified. That obviously wasn't the case.
I've got a friend who used to translate for the U.N.
Sometimes you do not want to mess up that translation and it's worth any price.
Believe me, in too many cases somebody thinks that a lower price can somehow be had without compromising quality. What if we let a bot do it and a human quickly checks the result? It's like proofreading, right?
Humans are error prone. That goes for both sides of these jobs. I mean the engineers who run these projects.
It's important to not get carried away with the allure of the tech industry. Especially the LLM hype. The people making these LLM models are human too. They're not unicorn tech wizards.
I've seen projects where the examples they gave us on what to submit were AI slop. They did not notice. By far the most common error with them is unclear and constantly changing guidelines. I've seen projects where their training videos were made by someone whispering nervously into the microphone. We had to crank the volume to hear them stumble over their words while trying to explain the project.
Ultimately most of these jobs exist to harvest data for projects that aren't that important. Forget about AGI or whatever. Think more along the lines of your weekend project. There's investor money right now so they have to use it.
They won't be paying people (read: impoverished third world countries) more than a few dollars an hour to grind out mountains of training data to feed into models. They're not chasing unicorns here. It's just slop generating LLMs. There's investor money so they have to use it. Why would they split more of the loot with clickworker tier peons.
Here's a bonus anecdote. One of the projects showed us literal shit in their training materials. A wet turd. I think it must have been a disgruntled employee. After hearing about how much Facebook employees hate working in the AI division, I think it must have been.
Very much this. The level of trust that these companies have in their models was shocking to me before I noticed just how much trust the general population puts into these things. I think that these companies, such as Google and OpenAI need to be held accountable when things go wrong. It should not alway be on the end user. They need to own up to their mistakes. AI needs to be regulated. We also need data privacy and data protection laws. It is insane that am AI can lock you out of all of you data without any human intervention. I know people will say that you should have back ups and I agree, but I that Trina a blind eye to the bigger problem of how much power has been given to these companies. I am particularly not a fan of Google and hope they get broken up, but that is another somewhat unrelated topic.
AI: OMNOMNOM this salt is fucking delicious.
Uranium salt? I hear it gives you extra strength. Or an extra arm. Whatever.
I prefer salt of saturn
I've heard of people leaving perplexity because the CTO is strongly encouraging devs to use AI vibe coding and not waste their time manually reviewing the code themselves. Sounds like a shit show.
reams of fresh inputs.
Thank your "journalists" who "graduated high school" for their interesting take on mass nouns.
