It’s not just you — search results really are getting worse. Amazon Web Services (AWS) researchers have conducted a study that suggests 57% of content on the internet today is either AI-generated or translated using an AI algorithm.
The study, titled “A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism,” argues that low-cost machine translation (MT), which takes a given piece of content and regurgitates it in multiple languages, is the primary culprit. “Machine generated, multi-way parallel translations not only dominate the total amount of translated content on the web in lower resource languages where MT is available; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages,” the researchers wrote in the study.
They also found evidence of selection bias in what content is machine translated into multiple languages compared to content published in a single language. “This content is shorter, more predictable, and has a different topic distribution compared to content translated into a single language,” the researchers’ wrote.
What’s more, the increasing amount of AI-generated content on the internet combined with increasing reliance on AI tools to edit and manipulate that content could lead to a phenomenon known as model collapse, and is already reducing the quality of search results across the web. Given that frontier AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude rely on massive amounts of training data that can only be acquired by scraping the public web (whether that violates copyright or not), having the public web stuffed full of AI-generated, and often inaccurate, content could severely degrade their performance.
“It is surprising how fast model collapse kicks in and how elusive it can be,” Dr. Ilia Shumailov from the University of Oxford told Windows Central. “At first, it affects minority data—data that is badly represented. It then affects diversity of the outputs and the variance reduces. Sometimes, you observe small improvement for the majority data, that hides away the degradation in performance on minority data. Model collapse can have serious consequences.”
The researchers demonstrated those consequences by having professional linguists classify 10,000 randomly selected English sentences from one of 20 categories. The researchers observed “a dramatic shift in the distribution of topics when comparing 2-way to 8+ way parallel data (i.e. the number of language translations), with ‘conversation and opinion’ topics increasing from 22.5% to 40.1%” of those published.
This points to a selection bias in the type of data that is translated into multiple languages, which is “substantially more likely” to be from the “conversation and opinion” topic.
Additionally, the researchers found that “highly multi-way parallel translations are significantly lower quality (6.2 Comet Quality Estimation points worse) than 2-way parallel translations.” When the researchers audited 100 of the highly multi-way parallel sentences (those translated into more than eight languages), they found that “a vast majority” came from content farms with articles “that we characterized as low quality, requiring little or no expertise, or advance effort to create.”
That certainly helps explain why OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman keeps keening on about how its “impossible” to make tools like ChatGPT without free access to copyrighted works.
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.