From announcement post:
Hi, I am a locale leader of SUMO Japanese community. I have contributed to the Support over 20 years, before the beginning of support.mozilla.org.
Today, November 4, we decided to end our SUMO Japanese community.
In October 22, the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles. I cannot accept its behavior and no words.
- It doesn’t follow our translation guidelines.
- It doesn’t respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost.
- It approves its direct English MT immediately for All archived KB articles.
- It approves only in 72 hours after its updates, so we lost our work to train new contributors.
- It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications.
- Over 300 Knowledge Base articles are overridden by sumobot.
They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.
Therefore, I (marsf) declare:
- I quit to contribute to support.mozilla.org.
- I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.
- I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.
However, individual Japanese contributors may want to work in their responsibility. It is their choice, we don’t care nor support.
Bye.
Based on some of the reactions from other translation teams it seemed linked to a bug specific to Asian languages though. I didn’t read all of the comments because some wrote half a novel, but while this absolutely sucks it sounds more like a botched attempt at introducing the sumo bot than a deliberate slight.
The enshittify continue! What browser should i jump to?
Zen maybe. Everything is either chromium or Firefox or safari right now. I keep using Firefox so google doesn’t have complete control over everything. I don’t want to use anything chromium either.
Whichever one works in Japanese I suppose
Sorry, the only options are Big Shit and Shit Lite.
Then imma have one Quarter Shitter, 2 Large Shitty McFries, and coke.
Would you like to try our EXTRA BIGASS FRIES?
The finance department can help with your loan application.
I’d like to inform you that you can have brave shit and wolf shit, too!
Homophobic crypto shit
I don’t get the logic behind replacing high quality human translations with lower quality AI ones.
It’s not logic. It’s someone chasing buzzwords wanting something they can slap their name on. They have no real talent or skill and believe AI is the way for “them” to finally achieve something. This is preferable to them over actually making an effort to learn and improve themselves.
Because as soon as they amoratize the $100Bs spent on development, its cheaper.
The reasoning is: we MUST shove AI into literally everything because that’s what everyone else is doing. What if it ends up working for them and we stay behind? Then the line will stop going up!
I can’t wait for this damn bubble to burst.
AI slop for the AI slop investors!
Probably it could simplify their deployment process. They could package all AI translated languages at the same time of English packaging. Instead of waiting for volunteer for human translation.
However, it is extremely shortsighted, especially considering it’s Mozilla which is technically a non-profit company. It’s more understandable if it’s a public company with investor’s pressure and there are costs associated with manual translation.
But it wont’t simplify the process if the SumoBot reverts human-made translations. I read the post of Michele Rodaro who seems to bee in charge of the Italien Community, and he wrote that the Italian language is rather complex and nuanced language. Some sentences requiere more words, verbs, and phrases that doesn’t refelct the original En-US text.
" If a technical writer edits the original en-US article and replaces some words in a sentence, or just some words, SumoBot intervenes in the translation of that sentence and rearranges it to faithfully reflect the en-US text. So, if I added something to make a concept more understandable for an Italian user, those additions have been reverted in the new version of SumoBot"
One day we may find something AI won’t defile, but sadly that day isn’t today.
Good job, Mozilla! You had people working for you for free, and you managed to fuck it up by trying to replace their voluntary efforts with a sub-par alternative costing you money. You idiots.
Grey goo, y’all
“More brown-ish, and the smell is horrendous.”
I’m a little confused. Are these translations not in source control? Can you not revert the changes since it was introduced?
Pretty sure they are. After all he said to not use his work for training. So it still exists somewhere.
But the volunteers see it as an attack on or dismissal of their contributions. Especially since the bot applied the changes directly to production. They don’t quit because it’s irreversible, they quit because of the message leadership sent.
Yes, you can. But the main problem is that the bot updates or translates immediately, which means they can’t really train new contributors on how the localization process works and the syntax of the Sumo wiki if they just end up proofreading what the SumoBot already translated. Besides that, it seems like the implementation of the bot happened without any communication, which is a shitty move and a middle finger to the community anyway.
And what about archive.org?
Mozilla just can’t stop with these unforced errors lately.
lately? you mean since forever
