Thoughts On Working With AI to fill the job drought gap?

Ari Dupree wrote:



It is incredible, of course. But will it still be able to do that ten years from now, when 'typical' style has shifted with cultural changes? Because if it doesn't, then it's just a fancy toy. The AI's ability to stay relevant over time is going to depend on the creators being dedicated to updating the massive data sets, and/or hiring actual translators to generate those data sets. That is going to be an ongoing problem for them, sooner than anyone thinks. (Particularly sooner than CEOs who tend to never look more than five years down the road.)

The biggest limitation of AI is that it requires massive data sets that have to be updated on an ongoing basis (from high-quality, credible sources) if the tool is going to stay relevant over the course of years. A big challenge facing AI (or so I hear) is that the required data sets are so large that it's unwieldy to update them. Culture changes quickly, and they are going to struggle to keep up. (Imagine trying to market anything tech-related using the same language and strategies that were employed even last year, much less five years ago...)

I'm not an AI expert, but I was told by someone who is that no one is actually innovating around this problem right now, because it would require inventing generalized AI. Right now, they're just making the same style of learning algorithms look more impressive by throwing increasingly larger computing power and data sets at them. The larger the data sets get, the more impressive the AI looks in the short term, but the harder it gets to keep them relevant in the long term.

AI is here to stay and it's definitely shaking up the industry, and has been doing so since I started working over ten years ago (back then, it was Google Translate that was going to put us all out of jobs, but I've noticed we're still here...) I just don't believe it's going to spell the end of translation as a profession, any more than the invention of the computer spelled the end of accounting as a profession

[Edited at 2024-05-17 17:50 GMT]

STEPHEN YOUNG wrote:

I work with Japanese -> English in many different services, including translation, review, subtitles, LQA, native checks, light nMTPE, heavy MTPE, transcription, etc.

However, it seems (for me anyway) that things dried up last month and look a little ok for May (I know GoldenWeek is happening and is a thing, haha).
Because of this, I've felt almost forced to start moving into working with AI in a technical and linguistic sense in order to fill the gaps, which I am 50/50 on since I love translation; it's what I've always done, but also have a personal love for tech so I don't mind working for AI to fill the gaps, but just wish it would all go back to normal.

As a side note to this, I have noticed my once normal, if not below normal, rates are being treated like super insanely high rates.

Have any of you guys been doing something on the side to wait out the drought, or are you not in a drought?

Also, have you're used-to-be standard rates now become classified as overly high rates?

Denis Fesik wrote:
I'm not sure if everyone here sees what I see in my forum feed, but my current feed is chock-full of threads about techy stuff (tools, bots & Co.) and no longer features any topics I'd find interesting to explore.

Christopher Schröder wrote:


Me too. There haven't even been any fights recently. Where's Tom?