I translate for a living, and sometimes I’m forced to translate marketing. Lately there’s a shift in the bullshit copy I receive to work on. Slogans 6 months ago were all ‘Use AI or your company goes broke!’ and now it’s ‘Use our product to make your AI agents more efficient and reduce token use!’. It’s hilarious, I’m half ashamed to have to participate in perpetuating this garbage, and fascinated that any decision maker in any organization would keep adding layers of bullshit on top of their tech stack to stay ahead of the competition. I wonder how many layers of bullshit they can still squeeze between reality and profit before it all comes down.
I can have my AI be ALMOST has Efficient and Inexpensive as a HUMAN! SIGN me UP!
-Highly Paid Job Creators!
How do I get a job as a job creator?
- Give yourself the title “Job Creator”
- Congratulations, you created a job.
you just gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps
*create yourself up by your jobstraps
Choose rich, wrll-connected, socially adept parents.
- Shit on the floor
- Profit? (you have created a job because someone has to clean it)
Highly paid low wage job creators
Highly paid low wage job creators
There is some ai company that routinely spams my work email. Various typical vague, “AI will fix everything with your work” promises.
Then some report came out that 95% of business AI adoption failed. I figured either it would be ignored, or some response explaining how the study was mistaken or didn’t say what folks said it did.
Instead, that company said “Study shows that 95% of business use of AI fails, you don’t want to be in that 95%, so use our services to make sure you are in that 5%”. Had to hand it to them, they really found a way to steer into the skid.
I am currently reading bullshit jobs, and have a feeling you will like the book if you haven’t read it already.
I have read it, but it’s time for a re-read. Most of the words I write are bullshit and do not make the world a better place and I found the book (as well as Graeber’s other books) incredibly enlightening. I spend a non-zero amount of time grieving that the man cannot write more books. ‘Bullshit jobs’ motivates me to work as little as I can (by living frugally and recycling, reusing, repairing, DIYing everything and growing my own food). It also motivates me to be creative in my free time, to use words and other artistic expression for less idiotic stuff. Maybe one day I can make the shift to be a fully functional member of society. They are advertising a job for the maintenance of local shit treatment stations currently, and I am quite tempted to apply. If only there were part-time options for out-in-the-world jobs, my autistic ass doesn’t handle full time.
Maybe one day I can make the shift to be a fully functional member of society
My friend it sounds like you are doing great, not abiding by current social norms in no meter for usefulness.
How would you gauge the threat AI may or may not pose to your own job?
The worst damage to my job happened decades ago when they introduced CAT tools and MT (Computer Aided Translation and Machine Translation). They started with introducing software to help you translate. Text was broken up in sentences which were translated one by one and fed into huge databases. These were the first steps towards today’s LLMs. Also, a tool that was supposed to help translators with consistency and formatting was really just stealing all our work. When they had all our TMs, step two, MT, was introduced. The computer predicted what word would come next, the translator just checked and corrected, for a lower rate. Just like what happens now in IT.
Two years ago towards peak AI hype, all my work had dried up. It came so unpredictably fast I had all my life turned upside down. Then last summer the jobs came trickling in again and now I seem to be back to having steady work. In my industry the spell seems to lift, they found that they can’t just AI us away. Of course they fucked up the art of translation in the process and I still have to mostly work on MT for peanuts and there’s so much AI marketing bullshit still to translate, but at least I’ve got food on my table again, yay.
