A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism · HackerPapers discussions

A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism — mentioned by red-iron-pine

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:55:07 GMT

easily 30-40%. you could see trends even as far back as 2020. same patterns as with reddit. e.g. bunch of old accounts with random bursts of activity, often posting to old / stale threads (e.g. 2-3 days old, when no one is looking at them), and often saying generic one liners or regurgitating summarizations of top / most upvoted points. except when the posts were about some hot topic, bet you can guess which ones... AWS AI Researchers put bot traffic as high as 50% across the internet in this study from June 2024: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05749

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism — mentioned by chacham15

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 17:55:08 GMT

The title is clickbait. The actual study[0] reads as follows: > Multi-way parallel, machine generated content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages This is talking specifically about text being translated into less common languages being done mostly by machine translation and that in those languages most of the content found was as a result of machine translation. This has nothing to do with English or more common languages overall. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05749.pdf

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism — mentioned by orbital-decay

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 17:52:04 GMT

The study they refer to [1] seems to be about machine-translated versions of human-written pages (that exist on a large scale for a ~decade already). The article somehow blows it out of proportion, it's not like most of what you're reading is generated by the current crop of large transformers. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05749.pdf

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism — HN submission

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 12:25:56 GMT

Much of the Web Is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism

95 points; 75 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.