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AI won't take your job, might shrink your wages, European Central Bank reckons
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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I am a translator. Some decades ago the language industry introduced MT - some kind of precursor of LLM. The prices of translation jobs didn't change, and translators didn't lose their work entirely. But gradually we were offered more and more MTPE (euphemism for fixing the robot's shit) jobs, for a lower rate. Many older colleagues stayed with the few remaining translation jobs, young people starting out became "MTPE editors". These days there are a few translation jobs, many MTPE jobs, and more and more jobs in "AI output rating" - and the new generation will be working as an "AI linguistic assistant" or other such barbarity for even less money.
The tech isn't necessarily bad in itself, but what we have to wake up to is that tech is used to pay each generation after us a little less. We have to resist this and demand fair pay for fair work always - no matter if they want to call it 'translation', 'AI output review' or 'ertdfg sfdgs' - it has a price, and this price has to respect our dignity and enable a healthy life for us language workers and all other workers.
Yeah that's pretty consistent with my expectations. A lot of work will transition into fixing the robots mistakes. So we'd be ceding the interesting, more creatively challenging aspects of our jobs to AIs and turning into data janitors. And that would only last as long as we'd be necessary. They'd hammer out the details making that janitor work eventually disappear.
I do design and illustration and it'd kind of be like telling me "Well we don't need you to illustrate this stuff anymore, but Midjourney still draws shitty hands with too many fingers. So your job now is to fix those hands." That is not what I came here to do and that does not provide the fulfillment I seek from a line of work. And following that analogy, Midjourney will eventually make flawless hands and I'd be out of a job.
Fortunately right now AI cannot hit a specific design/illustration brief to the consistent standards my projects require, nor iterate on a project based on specific and vague client feedback. So I still have work for now, but I see the writing on the wall. I'm always surprised other people don't see that writing too.
This whole thing is going to make an insane chasm of the wealth equality divide we already have.
Have you not noticed any effect from midjourney on your line of work yet?
Yeah for sure. Mostly indirectly. I know a few people in my line of work who lost jobs because the client decided to just use AI to generate something.
I've also seen a number of examples of publications using AI images for editorial pieces which absolutely used to be paying jobs. For example this Atlantic article on Alex Jones. An actual person would have been paid to do a piece like this before AI came around.
And also there was the San Francisco ballet that did a bunch of their Nutcracker promo campaign art with AI stuff last year. They had traditionally used artists and photographers for years to do key pieces for their promo materials.
And as far as I am personally concerned, I've seen a marked slump in the volume of work inquiries I've been getting in the last year. I've been fortunate enough to remain fully booked and in the past just had to turn down a lot of work, but right now I'm getting about half as many inbound inquiries as I would have even a year ago. Hard to pin that on any one thing but I am sure AI is a factor. I'd be lying if I said that there haven't been a number of my jobs over the years that couldn't have been done with one of these AI models and a little trial and error.
I've also had a few clients now send me Midjourney stuff and basically want me to replicate it but make it work for whatever thing it was they were needing artwork for. So right there, that's all the fun problem solving and artistic exploration out the window and it's basically a case of "fix the robot's thing." It's pretty depressing.
I'd be mostly fine with the robots doing away with all of our jobs if it meant we were heading into some post-work utopia where we got to just spend time doing the things that really matter to us, but that's almost definitely not where this is going. All the windfalls will go to the top, the jobs will be less interesting, and wages will be depressed.
Your last paragraph really sums up my feelings on all of this. Work becoming easier and less needing to be done should be a good thing but we’re handling it terribly as a society
I am literally fixing punctuation all day that AI is too stupid to pick up. But it translates whole paragraphs most beautifully. I spend most of my working day in some state of dissociation, with an occasional laugh as I watch what I thought was civilization crumble before my eyes - as always, my work software wanted an update before starting a new project, and as ever more often, didn't work after the update. Nobody gives a shit about quality anymore and I guess we're all on drugs or suffer the consequences of long Covid, or both.
Yeah I feel like it must have really done a number on the field of translation. Also voice over work at the low to mid budget is probably done for with what those voice AI models can do now. It's a sad state of affairs and it's disheartening to see so many people cheer it on without caveats.
Tell me about it! I'm an audiobook narrator and I jumped on the AI bandwagon because my job as is, is bound to disappear. Now I can offer audiobooks narrated with my cloned voice for my clients with low budgets.
Audible doesn't accept ai narrated books as of yet, but it's just a matter of time.
Interestingly though, none of my clients went the AI road yet and still prefer to pay me rather than 3 times less for my AI voice. I bet that won't last though.
I'm also looking into completely changing field. How about healthcare, I'm sure they'll never stop needing and/or abusing those in this field.....
It's of course heavily hyped. No matter that the AI they are hyping for translation now isn't much different from the MT we are using since more than a decade.
Btw I like the MT with reservations as it saves my hands from typing a lot. And I have been picky in choosing clients and negotiating my services, so I can't complain personally. But I would like to help organize online language workers in some way, and make sure AI doesn't fuck up quality even further, and demand reasonable rates. Especially for those poor folks in cheap translation mills (forgot their names). I also have heard of rates like 0.03€ doing translations for a (South) EU government, work for which usually a language degree is necessary, yet people accept these laughable shit rates.