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.
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.