Turfster

genuinely incredible writeup here https://www.patreon.com/posts/98498779

And includes a TON of emails that were intentionally leaked by a staff member. The frankness with which they go about seeking to secretly bar from the awards basically any author who's ever tweeted about china or any political issue related to china, uses china for inspiration in any way (up to and including diaspora authors), or is just plain LGBT at all - and it's not clear AT ALL whether they were pressured or just decided do to this on their own initiative! - is wild and incredibly chilling. I can't imagine this isn't going to lead to a reckoning.

Disney Can't Put Gays In Their Movies Because Of China, But For Books

Ah.

Last week, according to The Verge, the staff of Gizmodo en Español—Gizmodo's Spanish wing, tasked with "original stories and created Spanish-language adaptations of pieces from the English-language Gizmodo" were fired and replaced with machine translation. The move is a part of a broader pivot to "artificial intelligence" by G/O Media, and comes just a few months after their sites began to post AI-generated articles full of factual errors (which have generally been a fiasco in their own right).

Unsurprisingly: the pivot here continues to go poorly. New Gizmodo en Español pieces are effectively being Google Translated—and not particularly well! In one amusing and illustrative example, writer Víctor Millán reported an example of machine translation giving up midway through an article, leaving one half in Spanish and the other half in English. And even G/O Media themselves don't seem especially confident in machine translation—each article now has a disclaimer at the bottom reading “Contents have been automatically translated from the original. Due to the nuances of machine translation, there can be slight differences.” («Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente del material original. Debido a los matices de la traducción automática, pueden existir ligeras diferencias.»). This is in stark contrast to when they were translated by actual people, and did not have this problem.

On the personal side of things, the move seems almost designed to be as callous as possible. AZ Adslzone, a Spanish-language publication, reports that the staff of Gizmodo en Español were fired by video call—and due to their contracts, will not be given severance.