End of Japanese community | SUMO community discussions | Forums | Mozilla Support
support.mozilla.org

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.

  • xxce2AAb@feddit.dk
    135·
    4 days ago

    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.

  • Grimy@lemmy.world
    105·
    4 days ago

    I don’t get the logic behind replacing high quality human translations with lower quality AI ones.

    • Rozaŭtuno
      31·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • ChuckTheMonkey@fedia.io
      32·
      4 days ago

      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.

      • UndergroundGoblin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        13·
        3 days ago

        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"

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
      7·
      3 days ago

      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.

  • expr@programming.dev
    30·
    3 days ago

    I’m a little confused. Are these translations not in source control? Can you not revert the changes since it was introduced?

    • AAA@feddit.org
      34·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • UndergroundGoblin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      10·
      3 days ago

      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.

  • Pringles@sopuli.xyz
    10·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • UndergroundGoblin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      9·
      3 days ago

      When you introduce a bot that can and will revert any human-made translation, even if the translation is fine, then that’s a huge middle finger to a community that is over two decades old. They could have rolled out the new bot on a staging server to test, discuss, and improve how the SUMO Bot could lend the community a hand, but instead, they decided to deploy it directly on the live server without any communication.

      The bug caused the SUMO bot to revert already translated content back to English. So that doesn’t really have anything to do with why everyone is upset.