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A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine::Researchers warn that most of the text we view online has been poorly translated into one or more languages—usually by a machine.
I’ve been saying for quite a while now that the Internet was best in the '90s and early 2000s back before it was commercialized, even despite all the “under construction” gifs and whatnot. The signal/noise ratio has only continued to drop since then.
I hope you remember the amounts of spam and machine-translated text back then.
Being not an English speaker, you’d basically expect most of what you find to be machine-translated and badly at that.
Pirate localizations of games were basically translated the way that you’d get some basic idea sometimes somewhere, but in general it was probably worse than the English version, which would at least make some sense if you knew some English.
It’s people and IT companies which were better.
Since I am an English speaker, my '90s Internet experience was very different than that. There were “link farms” (pages designed to exploit early search engine algorithms that scored pages higher when they got linked to a lot) and e-mail spam, of course, but being unsophisticated, it was generally a lot easier not to get suckered in by than the firehose of AI-written advertorials and shit we have today.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
An advertorial is an advertisement in the form of editorial content. The term “advertorial” is a blend (see portmanteau) of the words “advertisement” and "editorial. " Merriam-Webster dates the origin of the word to 1946. In printed publications, the advertisement is usually written to resemble an objective article and designed to ostensibly look like a legitimate and independent news story. In television, the advertisement is similar to a short infomercial presentation of products or services.
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Counterpoint: the Internet still exists as it did back then, but relatively smaller compared to what it’s become.
You just need to find the right people and content to interact with, which is harder now because there’s so much more garbage. I’d say they have grown in absolute numbers.