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.
GMG Union and Onion Union released a joint statement earlier today condemning the move, which is transcribed below in full:
The Onion and GMG Unions are saddened to report that our colleagues at Gizmodo Español, a site that once housed original, quality Spanish-language reporting, have been replaced en masse by an AI translation service. Instead of relying on the talented journalists at Gizmodo Español, G/O Media has enacted an automation that takes English-language Gizmodo articles, translates them poorly into Spanish, and posts them on Gizmodo Español almost immediately, with no Spanish-language editing. We offer our deepest sympathies to the Gizmodo Español team and share in their frustration as jobs for working journalists continue to disappear worldwide. The Gizmodo Español team comprised of four full-time employees—one editor and three writers—who have been employed by G/O media for over a combined 25 years. Because of the nature of their yearly contracts, they will not receive adequate severance.They were employed at half the rate of American staff writers due to the nature of these contracts, and were rarely offered raises. Unfortunately this move to eliminate the Español team represents yet another broken promise from G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller and Editorial Director Merrill Brown, who have repeatedly said that the company's AI experiments were intended to supplement human writing, not replace it. This week, a team of four has been [replaced] by an undisclosed automated machine translation service. Adding insult to injury, when the Gizmodo staff objected to having their bylines attached to machine translations, G/O management removed all bylines from Gizmodo Español—even the bylines of the four journalists who were laid off by G/O Media this week. We remain stringently opposed to G/O Media's use of AI-generated content and pledge to continue fighting on behalf of journalists and the indispensable public service they provide.
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