Technology

Yeah at that point they will likely push us into a situation where violence with capital is inevitable. I’m not super in agreement with Marx but he had some points here

The best part is, the MTPE workers’ output is 100% going to get fed back into the algorithms, so it’s only a matter of time before the average error rate of the models is good enough that there’s no real reason to pay anyone to look at it.

Not quite, yes and no. It will be ever so slightly off, and the slightly off gets fed back, and language will change. It is already happening since CAT tools introduced segmentation - which means texts were segmented, and thus translated, at sentence level. Where a human translator in front of an unaltered text would have joined some sentences and separated others in the translated text, one tends to stick to the segmentation when working in a CAT tool, and MT- and CAT-translated German sounds almost, but not quite, like human German - remember that beverage machine making tea in the Hitchhiker's Guide? Only we got used to drinking the stuff and reading the texts, what can we do.

And now you have the added feature of MT flavoured translated texts. I for my part really enjoy handmade things these days, fuck AI. I thought AI generated images were funny at first, then understood the computation needs involved, the intellectual property stolen and put to work for corporations, the implications for many digital workers ... it's just more awful than fun honestly and should just fuck off back into the arseholes of the thieving scammers who invented it.

Have you not noticed any effect from midjourney on your line of work yet?

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.

We used to and still have translators' associations, but most of them are stuck in the past. I was proving my skills as a translator by sitting at a desk and handwriting my translation while looking up stuff in physical dictionaries. They probably imagine that we are sitting in an office waiting for clients to walk in and hand us sheets of paper. It's still like this for a few of us, but the vast majority works as typing monkeys part of huge international teams and churns out translations by the meter, and can't afford neither the overpriced exam fees nor the inflated membership fees of organizations who do very little to support the positions of online translators.

So yes, we need a union. But I think it should be international, and best include all digital workers. We are the burger flippers of the digital world and deserve a living wage.

Now, as to AI, I would say the problem is that it's wasteful computation-wise, and that's why I'd rather not have it. I very much value reading texts by actual people, and look at images drawn by actual people and I am willing to pay for that. I want to use hand-knitted garments, hand-woven baskets and rugs, and not have sad people sit in factories 12 hours a day just so I can afford cheap plastic gadgets instead. So the other part of this would be to refuse consuming the cheap imitation of reality they offer after stealing everyone's works. Go treat yourself to the best and most beautiful, done by someone with passion and love for their work. Don't consume trash.

The problem in the case of translators, other digital workers, and unions, however is not really about AI versus brain, machine versus hand. It's about an economic system that forces us to work all day so we can survive. If you have to flip burgers, translate, dig potatos, play the violin 8 hours a day 5 days a week to survive, that's too much. Stop. Demand better.

If 10 farmers can make enough to feed 100 people, and new tech comes out that makes it possible for 5 farmers to make enough to feed 100 people, the ideal scenario is that now all 10 farmers should only have to work half as much. What usually ends up happening is that half the farmers are laid off so the boss at the top can pocket the extra money.

This is how we end up with enough resources to feed, clothe and house everyone but still have people living in poverty. Because the system is no longer designed to provide for people, it's meant to make profit for capitalists. It makes technological progress a negative instead of the positive of should be.

When our wealthy are legitimately discussing a trip to Mars, fair pay is about whatever the local McDonald's charges for a double quarter pounder x5000, per year. After taxes.

Don't ask, but check for yourself!

It's logical in a capitalistic sense. Yet it's arguable if that's how it's supposed to be. With all these industrialization, automation, now LLMs, we end up working even more to survive. If not for unions, progressives counteracting it, it could be even worse. Isn't it a regression instead of a progress? Why can't they, at least, start to work less with the same pay so we all end up here somewhen? Isn't that what everyone wants in the future?

Why exactly correcting the text after an AI requires less experience? Main engineer isn't paid less than his subordinates because they don't plan every wall socket themselves, it's an opposite, their experience and competence lets them lead the project and ensure it's up to stantards. They put their personal responsibility for the work their team put together.

I'm not a native English speaker and one of the reasons I started to learn it was because my local tranlations sucked ass. In the media, in books. Sometimes I could see the remains of a mistranslated english idiom that a human translator just didn't recognize. And that's just entertainment, and a bored person who dgaf. AI is just like that. It can't care, it doesn't dig into context, it doesn't intentionally choose what to write, it can't proofread itself. Imagine trusting more important cases like world diplomacy to someone who is just aproximately right, a workbook to someone who pick terminology at random and constantly changes it, a loveletter to an automated SEO optimizer. It can help you grasp the basics of what is said, that's all.

While professional translation is the Craft. And long before the first computer, different prominent authors competed with each other with their own translations of classic and well-known texts, these all got studied and compared ad nauseum, because it's an open question how to do it better. Academics constantly argue if old names for things still fit them, they can start a feud over a slight difference in their definitions you can't smell without 30 years in a field. And instead of mentioning the Bible that had exiles and bloodsheds started over these two, I'd put there our hated TikTok that makes billions of users by making their language of images so effective it's intoxicating. Thus I insist that language fucking matters.

And although in the beginning of my rant I stated I found many mistakes in translations, these helped me understand how much it takes to decode something right. How it's easy to fail it. To appreciate how much effort and soul goes into that, even if it's just correcting.

Your dismissal of their value could be a good trolling tho, if only it was. But it seems your way of seeing that subject may be too popular in masses and obviously profitable to the moneymakers. So perceive that not as a personal reply, but just me letting a steam off for once.

Technological progress is okay if it is

1. ecologically sustainable
2. in the hands of the public, not a few corporations.

And AI fails for both.