The internet’s steady fall into the AI-garbled dumpster continues. As Vice reports, a recent stud y conducted by researchers at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) AI Lab found that a “shocking amount of the web” is already made up of poor-quality AI-generated and translated content.
The paper is yet to be peer-reviewed, but “shocking” feels like the right word. According to the study, over half — specifically, 57.1 percent — of all of the sentences on the internet have been translated into two or more other languages. The poor quality and staggering scale of these translations suggest that large language model (LLM)-powered AI models were used to both create and translate the material. The phenomenon is especially prominent in “lower-resource languages,” or languages with less readily available data with which to more effectively train AI models.
In other words, in what the researchers believe to be a ploy to garner clickbait-driven ad revenue, AI is being used to first generate poor-quality English-language content at a remarkable scale, and then AI-powered machine translation (MT) tools transcribe said content into several other languages. The translated material gets worse each time — and as a result, entire regions of the web are filling to the brim with degrading AI-scrambled copies of copies.
