I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.

It’s something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And I’m not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, it’s the websites themselves.)

Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.

On a product page I then saw:

Material: gefühlt

This was very strange… because that makes no sense at all. “Gefühlt” is a form (participle) of the verb “fühlen”, which means “to feel”. It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.

So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense “to feel” as “felt”. And of course “felt” can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called “Filz”), so it’s a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context they’re in.

And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.

And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! It’s unbearable. At least there’s a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

I have been thinking about the true cost of running LLMs (of course, Ed Zitron and others have written about this a lot).

We take it for granted that large parts of the internet are available for free. Sure, a lot of it is plastered with ads, and paywalls are becoming increasingly common, but thanks to economies of scale (and a level of intrinsic motivation/altruism/idealism/vanity), it still used to be viable to provide information online without charging users for every bit of it. Same appears to be true for the tools to discover said information (search engines).

Compare this to the estimated true cost of running AI chatbots, which (according to the numbers I’m familiar with) may be tens or even hundreds of dollars a month for each user. For this price, users would get unreliable slop, and this slop could only be produced from the (mostly free) information that is already available online while disincentivizing creators from producing more of it (because search engine driven traffic is dying down).

I think the math is really abysmal here, and it may take some time to realize how bad it really is. We are used to big numbers from tech companies, but we rarely break them down to individual users.

Somehow reminds me of the astronomical cost of each bitcoin transaction (especially compared to the tiny cost of processing a single payment through established payment systems).