Digital Slime, the Dead Internet, and Cory Doctorow’s great phrase

Much of the user excitement in the early years of the Internet came from the medium’s powerful way in which it eliminated constraints on human communication. You could find your friend from high school, let the world know about an irritating customer experience, become well-known, and even learn skills from experts you didn’t know — and best of all, it was all for free! Those magical experiences have disappeared — to be replaced with what?

The astonishing prevalence of machine-trained garbage

Researchers at Amazon Web Services examined the consequences of free or low-cost AI tools, such as machine learning for translation, and came to an astonishing conclusion. Over half the sentences on the web have been translated into two or more languages, with sentences aimed at consumers in much of Africa and the Global South being machine-translated into click-bait garbage, presumably to garner advertising revenue.

They found that much of the Internet (57.1% of all sentences) was translated, and that “low resource” countries were far less likely to generate enough training data using those languages to be accurate. The result? Most of what a typical user in much of the world encounters is inaccurate at best, misleading or outright wrong at worst.