Reddit republishes threads with machine-translated content

google.com

3 points·jpalawaga··2 comments

I was looking for information on where I might find the daily words for Connections, accessible ideally behind a CORS-enabled resource. I stumbled across a Reddit thread where some users described an NYT json endpoint that lists crossword puzzles.

When I tried to see if anyone else on the internet talked about these endpoints, I stumbled upon a trove of machine-translated pages bearing the user's original names but the content rewritten. The only thing I think that distinguishes it is the "See Original" link.

I can't help but feel this is a bit disingenuous.

Linking directly to Google search results instead of a canonical destination link isn't usually the norm, so I almost dismissed this post, but I'm glad I didn't. Here's a clean version of the above URL without info about what browser initiated the search etc:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22crosswords/v3/puzzles.jso...

I thought that this was overblown at first, but upon some research, I recall reading about Reddit doing something with translations a bit over a year ago. This change being reflected in Google search results and commented about online is somewhat more recent, and the effect described due to Reddit AI translations is more visible when searching due to changes in their robots.txt and sitemap from what I could tell from the links below. Reddit has rolled out AI translations site-wide, and apparently they have been working with Google to accomplish this, though the level of Google involvement is unclear.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/08/reddit-tests-automatic-who... | https://archive.is/2QCx5

https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/reddit-ai-translations-g... | https://archive.is/orMIi

https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/auto-translating-content... | https://archive.is/RW154

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