Researchers warn that most of the text we view online has been poorly translated into one or more languages—usually by a machine.

A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine::Researchers warn that most of the text we view online has been poorly translated into one or more languages—usually by a machine.

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    2 years ago

    I recently was searching for some tips on overlanding routes. So many sites are just long strung together SEO word salad.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    201·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been saying for quite a while now that the Internet was best in the '90s and early 2000s back before it was commercialized, even despite all the “under construction” gifs and whatnot. The signal/noise ratio has only continued to drop since then.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      I hope you remember the amounts of spam and machine-translated text back then.

      Being not an English speaker, you’d basically expect most of what you find to be machine-translated and badly at that.

      Pirate localizations of games were basically translated the way that you’d get some basic idea sometimes somewhere, but in general it was probably worse than the English version, which would at least make some sense if you knew some English.

      It’s people and IT companies which were better.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Since I am an English speaker, my '90s Internet experience was very different than that. There were “link farms” (pages designed to exploit early search engine algorithms that scored pages higher when they got linked to a lot) and e-mail spam, of course, but being unsophisticated, it was generally a lot easier not to get suckered in by than the firehose of AI-written advertorials and shit we have today.

        • wikibot@lemmy.worldBEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

          An advertorial is an advertisement in the form of editorial content. The term “advertorial” is a blend (see portmanteau) of the words “advertisement” and "editorial. " Merriam-Webster dates the origin of the word to 1946. In printed publications, the advertisement is usually written to resemble an objective article and designed to ostensibly look like a legitimate and independent news story. In television, the advertisement is similar to a short infomercial presentation of products or services.

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        • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Right, but what we have today has been predicted by people seeing what was then (and even earlier).

    • maness300@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      2 years ago

      Counterpoint: the Internet still exists as it did back then, but relatively smaller compared to what it’s become.

      You just need to find the right people and content to interact with, which is harder now because there’s so much more garbage. I’d say they have grown in absolute numbers.

    • Laurel Raven@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      15·
      2 years ago

      In the beginning humanity was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

      Douglas Adams, probably…

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    The whole webring idea needs to come back. Human curated recommendations of good resources and pages. So long as these pages remain in the control of humans and dedicated to curation and are decentralised, unlike the search engines, then they’ll be reliable.

    Plugging in some social and community organisation, perhaps like a wiki, and you could get even more out of it.

  • SomeGuy69@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    I need an AI Firefox extension that detects badly translated AI text and automatically blocks those domains.

    • wikibot@lemmy.worldBEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

      The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating “The U. S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population”.

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