Gizmodo Fires Spanish Staff Amid Switch To AI Translator

Last week, Gizmodo’s parent company G/O Media fired the staff of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Espanol and began replacing them with AI translations of English-language articles. “G/O Media’s decision to eschew human writers for AI is part of a recent trend of media companies experimenting with AI tools as a way to maximize content output while minimizing human labor costs,” reports Ars Technica. “However, the practice remains controversial within the broader journalism community.” The Verge first reported the news. From the report: Previously, Gizmodo en Espanol had a small but dedicated team who wrote original content tailored specifically for Spanish-speaking readers, as well as producing translations of Gizmodo’s English articles. The site represented Gizmodo’s first foray into international markets when it launched in 2012 after being acquired from Guanabee. Newly published articles on the site now contain a link to the English version of the article and a disclaimer stating (via our translation from Google Translate), “This content has been automatically translated from the source material. Due to the nuances of machine translation, there may be slight differences. For the original version, click here.”

So far, Gizmodo’s pivot to AI translation hasn’t gone smoothly. On social media site X, journalist and Gizmodo reader Victor Millan noted that some of the site’s new articles abruptly switch from Spanish to English midway through, possibly due to glitches in the AI translation system. […] For Spanish-speaking audiences seeking news about science, technology, and Internet culture, the loss of original reporting from Gizmodo en Espanol is potentially a major blow. And while AI translation technology has improved significantly over the past decade, experts say it still can’t fully replace human translators. Subtle errors, mistranslations, and lack of cultural knowledge can impair the quality of automatically translated content.