Too late. Didn’t have time to prep backup plan, clients all went AI. Now I’m job hunting like a 15 years old trying to figure out what I can do with my skills now that everyone thinks they can be great at anything using Large lying models.
I’m a translator, so different type of gen ai but also heavily impacted. Here’s the thing, I enjoy translating with my brain and soul, finding nicely written stuff. Ai is flat, idiotic, makes mistakes but wrapped in a believable enough package that it’s hard to spot the errors.
So instead of spending an hour translating, I would spend ten minutes translating, then a random amount of time proofreading and looking for hidden mistakes, find stupid sentences translated as is or even sometimes saying the opposite of what it should be, and then spent a huge cognitive load on fixing that without breaking the barely good enough rest of text.
It’s usually not faster, or not by much, but it sucked all the pleasure out of the job by making me do another type of task.
Oh and the rates for ai translation is not even half that of human translation.
I personally chose to shut the business because I really wasn’t a translator anymore and was earning less anyway.
Even if it were faster, this isn’t the cognitive task I learned and enjoyed, this isn’t my craft and there is no pride in fixing shit from Large lying models. So your days feel pointless like a hamster on a wheel. No amount of money would fix that and as I said it doesn’t pay well anyway.
My service cost money and chatgpt was free. They all took the person that was interfacing with the multiple linguists and put that person in charge of asking the translations to chatgpt.
They lost in quality, quality control, cultural fitness of the message, creativity. But none of them cared and they just started pasting texts into chatgpt.
It’s not just me either. Projects are multilingual so there can be dozens of translators working on a given project. We all tried to reason and explain why that was stupid as hell.
But money saved is money so they did it anyway.
Initially I tried looking for new clients but the once buzzing world of translation was a ghost town, no one was asking for translation services anymore.
Some people don’t do AI for money, there’s a subgroup that thinks they are helping by doing the prep work with AI so we can deliver to them faster . That’s easier to work with because they usually understand when we explain why it doesn’t help at all.