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.
I really doubt the typical tech worker has that much conviction in LLMs themselves. It’s just what’s in style right now and it’s what’s getting them richer.
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
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.
That’s the cost of compression. You lose the source material, so it may hallucinate a bit.
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.
Lossy compression with no internal mechanism for detecting information corruption.
We did it! Progress! Let’s go back and show Claude Shannon!
“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.
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
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!
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 went from mobile apps programmer to school bus driver. 100X happier even if I make 1/6 what I used to.
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.
I absolutely despise morons who smugly pronounce language learning and translation work “solved”, while at the same time 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 out 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.
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.
I think that’s more or less the same idea as language carrying an authority. You can only use language for gating an ivory tower if the plebs believe your expensive terminology describes real and relevant facts. I think an insider language that doesn’t carry this authority gets called other names, slang maybe? Also used for gating, just not as a barrier towards rising towards a higher status position in academia or rich circles.
English and the internet have this potential of bringing people together, it’s quite powerful. You suddenly find out how your situation relates to people on other continents. I remember that before there was a much stronger feeling of ‘other’ towards people from other countries and cultures, and often the only information you could get about these others would be through the eyes of someone else. To be honest, even if the powers that be fuck up the internet beyond recognition now, that’s a kind of devil difficult to stuff back into the box.
I absolutely despise morons who smugly pronounce language learning and translation work “solved”
Juu sammoo miäkkii uonny uatelna. Kaekkee hienoenta tämmöttiissä uonku eip nuo alakoritmit ja semmottet oekkeest uo mittee ees ratkassukkaa. Miä eilispäevänä justiinsa opinni etteep tekoviksut ossoo ees kunnolla murutehia kientöö, vaek kyl miä nii luulinni juu. Tämmöttii kup vähäsennii huastelloopi ni eip hyö siihe oekkee mittee osannukkaa virikata! Kuukkels tuo etteenki se suols aenaki iha pelekköö paskoo, ol ihap hauskoo kyl lukkoo ja naaraa.
Is this supposed to be a meta comment to show that machine translation can’t help us read it?
Edit: If it is, well DeepL manages a pretty coherent translation:
Yeah, I feel the same way. All the fancy stuff in this field—those sub-rhythms and whatnot—aren’t really a solution at all. Just yesterday I learned that even the pros can’t always get the grammar right, even though I thought they could. I messed around with this a little, but I couldn’t really figure out how to make it work! That part at the beginning sounds like total crap, but it’s actually pretty funny to listen to and watch.
I’m guessing “sub-rhythm” should be “algorithm” and “pros” probably means software and not people. The last sentences could use some more context. But otherwise this sounds kinda logical.
Now Google Translate…
Yeah, I’m so sorry. All the fine things in this world, but those little things and the like, don’t solve the problem. Yesterday, I just didn’t study properly, I thought so. That’s a little bit of a huastelloopi, and it’s not good for you, but it’s not a big deal! Kuukkels, that’s why it’s always fun to play with the balls, it’s just fun to play with the balls and the girls.
…yeah.
Yes.
Yeah I’ve been thinking the same. The greatest thing about these is that those algorithms and whatnot haven’t really even solved anything. Just yesterday I learned that fake/artificial-smarts can’t even translate dialects correctly, even though I thought they could. If you talk something like this for a bit they weren’t really able to answer that! Google especially was giving out complete shit, but it was pretty funny to read and laugh.
If it was unclear, the point is: pick a random finn from the street and they can translate that pretty much from word to word, even if they are from a complete different dialect speaking area, whereas even at best AI could give you only something towards it. I can only use obscure things, like this as an example, as I do not speak that many other languages, but if the languages do not have much written record online, they are not going to be properly translatable. We are still surprisingly far from not needing human translators.
//And yes, Google was hilariously shit. I managed to make couple normal sentences, without even trying, that it just gave up completely and did not translate at all, only removed some random letters.
Actually lets break it down, so it is clearer what the accuracy was. I will not talk about the mistranslations, though.
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I have come to the same conclusion as the previous poster. DeepL identifies correctly I agree with them, but fails to pick up the nuance of it. Pretty good.
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I am indirectly taking part in mocking techbros for thinking AI has solved language learning. This is referencing the previous post, so DeepL could not know that without context. It somewhat picks up I am saying AI-stuff has not solved anything.
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It correctly picks up I learned something about language yesterday and that someone fails at it, but it fails to identify I am talking specifically about dialects and fails to clearly convey it is AI that fails. It translates correctly I mistakenly thought the previous thing was true.
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I am saying AI could not properly answer to talking in dialect, referencing indirectly I am talking in dialect in the message. DeepL picks up that I am saying something is failing, but does not convey anything else correctly.
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I’m telling Google was the worst at translating, and that I found that hilarious. DeepL fully fails to translate the meaning, but translates the word “shit” acceptably, and conveys correctly something is funny.
So what was lost in translation?
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Talking in dialect, and AI failing to translate dialects properly - Core part of the message, so really bad, that it was about dialects, was not conveyed.
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I am laughing at Googles translation abilities being the worst - Fails to convey this completely. Not a core part of the message, but still relatively important information.
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Nuance about thinking before agreeing - Leaving that out does not matter in casual conversation. If this was translation for a more “proper” thing, this could be bad though.
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Mocking techbros - This required context that wasn’t offered.
Okay, so it was in dialect. I honestly would not have expected translation programs to be able to do that at all. Or are Finnish dialects actually written language? In German they aren’t, but there are books written in a phonetical way in dialect, so there may be something for the AI to reference.
No, they are not usually written except people sometimes doing it casually in social media, but because our lettering system is almost fully phonetic, it is very easy to write and read them if you just speak finnish. Also if you are native speaker, you kind of learn the certain fluidity in the core of the language, so you can pretty much understand the words even if they vary a lot (except people from Rauma, nobody understands them).
I really thought it would have been cracked by AI because it can translate finnish pretty accurately (not always…) and if you can do that dialects aren’t hard at all, but I was surprised to find that it still cannot! I am assuming it really is just because there are not enough written sources to teach from.
//Oh, and as a summary my main points were, that AI most definitely has not “solved” learning and translating languages as it yet cannot even translate a lot of things, and I guess also, that you cannot trust AI translations if the text translated is some obscure language you do not know. They can sound convincing and form coherent sentences, but the meaning can be fully incorrect.
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I was just at a networking/research technology conference in Helsinki (TNC26) where the topic of nordic languages— especially minority ones—being under-represented by current automated transcription/translation tools came up in one of the side talks I attended. There’s some effort by various European NRENs and universities to train models on these languages so those tools can be more widely available to students, academics, and the public. The talk was about “Scribe” by SUNET (Swedish Research Network) hosting whisper models for this purpose.
That said, I do believe that learning a language by studying, immersion in the culture, and actually having conversations with people who speak it natively is the only way to really experience another language. There’s always something lost in translation if you can’t internalize a language by living it. In some ways language is one of the parts of the human experience that’s unique and irreproducible by LLMs (despite the name). Language is more than rote communication of information; it conveys ideas, emotions, the weight of memory and history.
Also, Finnish is fucking hard lol. I can usually pick up a bit of language wherever I travel, basic phrases usually. But DAMN trying to nail the epiglottal sounds of even “Hyvää yötä” threw me!
I only got to see Helsinki, but it was a beautiful city. The Finnish people I met were lovely with a great dry sense of humor, and I would love to visit again someday.
Kippis
I was just at a networking/research technology conference in Helsinki (TNC26) where the topic of nordic languages— especially minority ones—being under-represented by current automated transcription/translation tools came up in one of the side talks I attended. There’s some effort by various European NRENs and universities to train models on these languages so those tools can be more widely available to students, academics, and the public. The talk was about “Scribe” by SUNET (Swedish Research Network) hosting whisper models for this purpose.
That should be especially good for things like the multiple sapmi languages! At least in finnish you can already write in the proper “book language” and get pretty accurate translations, even though the dialects still escape that.
Also, Finnish is fucking hard lol. I can usually pick up a bit of language wherever I travel, basic phrases usually. But DAMN trying to nail the epiglottal sounds of even “Hyvää yötä” threw me!
It is usually especially hard to learn for indo-european speakers, so it is not just you struggling! Haha :)
Well, it is always fun to play with the balls and the girls.
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 …
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.
Imho nothing wrong with AI use by professionals, as long as it’s verified. That obviously wasn’t the case.
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.
oh man it had been 3.4 nanoseconds since the last ai slop post here on lemmy, thanks for posting!
The slop will continue until the bubble bursts.
the bubble won’t burst dot com style like you’re all hoping btw, it’s not a bunch of tiny companies over valued, the biggest companies invested in ai are the biggest companies in the world
they’re not about to go broke, if anything the ai bubble popping would make them return to regular super insane profitability
No one thinks companies like Google or Microsoft are going away.
What’s going to happen is that OpenAI and Anthropic will ultimately fold because they can’t be profitable, Google and Microsoft will scale back their supremely unprofitable LLM operations, Micron and NVIDIA will plunge in value because all of a sudden their bloated prices aren’t being paid by anyone, Oracle will suffer because OpenAI can’t pay its enormous bills with them, massive data center projects will end before completion, and a whole lot of smaller businesses that embraced all this madness will collapse.
That will have devastating ripple effects throughout the economy. It’s going to be a lot larger than the dotcom bubble bursting.
I do think the inflated valuations are in-fact existational threats to Microsoft and Google. Tech stocks are so over valued that they very well can go into a death spiral when investors no longer believe the company will grow exponentially. Its happened before, and will happen again. Thats why they are so desperate to hype AI. Thats the only illusion that have left to justify future growth.
I mean, the names will still be there, but you will have consolidation and buyouts and other changes of ownership. Some will continue as a shell of their former selves (like old school IBM), while others will just vaporise (Kodak). There’s not really a reliable mechanism for a companies valuation to shrink by several orders of magnitude and just cut back and continue as a stable smaller company.
Obviously, the people at the top will get government handouts to stay rich and it will be all our pensions that get cleaned out. Thats how this works. Cheer the bubble bursting, but only because the earlier the less harm for all of us. Ram won’t get cheaper either.
What’s going to happen is that OpenAI and Anthropic will ultimately fold because they can’t be profitable
OpenAI maybe because it has a consumer focus and most of their users aren’t paying, more likely they’ll restrict free use and increase pop ups to get people to sign up
Anthropic is already profitable if you take out the enormous spend they have on training, which if the bubble bursts would leave them as the number 1 ai provider, it’s also insanely in demand and has trouble keeping up with its current product, they also have several products mythos etc lined up
That will have devastating ripple effects throughout the economy
I doubt it, I think it’d be closer to liberation day tariff’s or the oil crisis, it’ll go down for a bit, many articles will be written about how this is the worst thing ever then 6 months later it’ll be back up again
As said all the major players in this game are super profitable major companies, that won’t change
Despite Lemmy doomer posting about AI every 2.8 nanoseconds it is getting better:
We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under a decade, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/
The only thing that worries me is that:
Economists warn that without AI-driven investment, the U.S. may already be in a recession, raising concerns about economic dependency.
The US economy might already be in the shitter and AI is just hiding it
Anthropic is already profitable if you take out the enormous spend they have on training, which if the bubble bursts would leave them as the number 1 ai provider, it’s also insanely in demand and has trouble keeping up with its current product, they also have several products mythos etc lined up
First off… Why in the world would you take out the enormous spend they have on training? Training is an ongoing expense, not a startup expense. If your expenses exceed your income, then you’re not making a profit.
Secondly, they had one quarter in which they reported (using non-GAAP accounting) a very slight amount of profit. That same quarter, SpaceX gave them a massive - and temporary - discount on rented compute.
We don’t have any reason to think they’re actually profitable.
I doubt it, I think it’d be closer to liberation day tariff’s or the oil crisis, it’ll go down for a bit, many articles will be written about how this is the worst thing ever then 6 months later it’ll be back up again
You’re way more optimistic than I am. If OpenAI and Anthropic crash, there are a huge number of businesses that have built themselves around their products, and those will crash, too. And I think you’re downplaying the damage the tariffs have already done.
As said all the major players in this game are super profitable major companies, that won’t change
Again, not true. OpenAI is not profitable. Anthropic is almost certainly not profitable. Grok from SpaceX is not profitable. Google is profitable, but not from Gemini. Microsoft is profitable, but not from Copilot.
No business that is built entirely on AI is profitable. Not one.
Look… No one’s arguing that the coding tools built around AI are entirely useless. They’re not (although their capabilities are way, waaaaay over-hyped). The problem is an economic one: Serving up AI models cannot be profitable. There’s just no way, especially now that we have small AI models that can be run on local workstations, and offer similar performance to the frontier models.
Qwen, running in a well-designed harness such as OpenCode, with a carefully written AGENTS.md file, is of comparable performance to at least Claude Sonnet, and possibly Claude Opus. All without the massive, ludicrous infrastructure requirements.
How is Anthropic supposed to compete with that? Sure, you can probably get something useful out of Opus faster, but at the cost of thousands of dollars. Using Qwen and similar local models is free.
Removed by mod
How did they not see that coming? AI could have been a handy tool as a wingman handling small, repetitive tasks. Instead we get a giant mess that expensive and not terribly useful. To me it’s like EVs. Which would have been great second around town cars until the infrastructure could catch up.
Would have been? EVs are exactly that. They’re great. Ones with range can easily replace cars with internal combustion engines for most use-cases. Usually costs me about $5 a month to keep mine charged.
Fully agree on LLMs being expensive messes that aren’t very useful, though.
Not the above poster, but I would say the cost. Modern EVs are designed to replace cars, and so cost the same or more, while being not quite as convenient for long trips.
We could have all had lightweight, city-speed but cheap, short-range EVs for a decade or two already if that was the approach taken. The battery requirements for 60kph and maybe 100km of range are super minimal, even before you go lighter. Like an order of magnitude smaller.
Might have worked if the street infra and laws allowed it. Would have been super tough to pull off at the start, and a lot of people lack the parking for two different vehicles. I do remember some companies trying these, but there’s no where appropriate to drive them.
I feel like you are describing the Nissan Leaf. Bought one used in like 2017 for $12k and it could only do like 80 miles on a charge but that’s more than enough to get to work and back. Cost about $1 of electricity per 100 miles (apologies for freedom units)
