G/O Media, the private equity katamari that rolled up most Gawker blogs, The Onion and various other well-loved sites of the web age, is apparently replacing foreign-language editions with AI translations of the English-language sites. First to go is Gizmodo en Español, the Spanish-language edition of the gadget blog, and its writers, reports The Verge.
Matías S. Zavia, a writer at Gizmodo en Español, posted that the publication was shut down on August 29th and that it would now publish automatically translated articles. Gizmodo en Españolpreviously had a small staff who wrote original stories and created Spanish-language adaptations of pieces from the English-language Gizmodo.
The result is typical AI rubbish, all errors and generative blather.
Readers posted on X, formerly Twitter, that some articles will start in Spanish and then suddenly change to English. Spanish website AZ Adslzone reported Gizmodo en Español's team was told via video call of the decision. G/O Media did not return a request for comment.
If it makes no sense just how bad it is, remember that the cog representing "humans actually reading it" is so well-hidden in the depths of the machine that the people running these sites aren't sure it needs to be there any more. On and on it goes, until it stops.
