This is soooo weird: Krebs on Security, Lorem Ipsum: Of Good & Evil, Google & China.
Recent Bluessky Posts- Obviously would be best to prevent this. 2nd best: can we ask same and/or different AI to scan the papers claiming breakthroughs in math (and other things?) and look for aspects that already have appeared in published papers? Would that find them? September 7, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Jotwell Family: Shayak Sarkar, Regulating Paid Childcare, JOTWELL (September 7, 2026) (reviewing Luis Faundez & Manisha Padi, Licensing Enforcement and the Supply of Childcare (June 22, 2026) (unpublished manuscript)(available at SSRN)), family.jotwell.com/regulating-p.... September 7, 2026 Jotwell
- It is interesting how Rubio manages to be more despicable than Vance since Rubio has actual power to wield to do horrible things, but because Vance talks nasty and sneers he looks worse. September 6, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- New post September 5, 2026 Sandieglo
- NY Bar complaint filed against AG Todd Blanche for disobeying a court order in #Epstein files case. cmarmitage.substack.com/p/todd-blanc... September 4, 2026 Michael Froomkin
I think the explanation is quite simple.
That text, in it’s full version, is used in (among many other places) Latex typesetting software, which is used by all kinds of people that might be writing things about Nato or the Internet. When used, you often will make mock documents, fill it out with that text to see how they look, etc. Then you add in your REAL text as needed. I have numerous examples of this on my computer that I’ve used over the years.
It is 100% conceivable, if not inevitable, that examples of the above-described before and after, have been scanned by Google. maybe they were posted on line. Maybe they were emailed. Maybe they were in an on-line how-to page for typesetting. Maybe maybe maybe.
Then Google’s autonomous, apparently self-teaching software linked a default text to some completed documents and “learned” how to translate that text – leading to the odd results you cite.
The specific details are unknown, but that’s almost surely what happened.
The bigger issue is that Google IS scanning this stuff. This isn’t proof of anything going on with Google Translate, it’s proof that nothing on-line slips by Google’s gaze – and that’s far scarier.