@baldur Still sort of surprising they didn’t deal with this before an article could be written. Perhaps everyone who knew how to spot/address this got laid off?
@cbirdsong Yeah, I'm guessing it's a bit of both. The changes are happening faster. But my impression from the responses from Googlers cited in the article is that they were genuinely surprised, which would indicate that the lay-offs affected their ability to monitor what's happening.
Local search results in Icelandic have been filled with auto-translated spam since well before ChatGPT took off. I just thought it was the usual US tech co thing of not giving a single solitary fuck about languages other than English. Like how Apple’s autocomplete is significantly worse in many smaller languages.
@baldur I'm not really sure it's usable in English? In the last year or two I just don't find what I'm looking for on Google. It could be a problem with "documentation" moving to discord, but that's just part of it I think.
@skorkr Oh, it’s definitely been getting substantially worse in English over the past couple of years in my experience as well. The decline just began a bit earlier in smaller languages like Icelandic.
@baldur In Danish, bad output of translation systems is often called "dåsedansk" ("canned Danish"). This is because early automatic translation systems would consistently translate the English word "can" (eg. "be able to") into "dåse" (eg. the metal container), no matter the context. This was sometimes hilarious.
ChatGPT doesn't do this, but its Danish grammar is very bad. It screws up grammatical gender all the time, and invents its own words (and I'm guessing it's even worse in Icelandic).
@baldur
The most funny example I've personally seen of dåsedansk was in a DVD player's OSD, many years ago. It'd write "mute" as "fugleskarn" (bird shit), "invalid entry" as "svagelig indtræden" (weak entrance) etc. I don't think there was a single thing it got right.
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