• andrew_bidlaw
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    1 year ago

    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.