Submitted by Coopossum t3_125vy19 in Futurology
As a translator by trade who since moved on to greener pastures, I feel like I've seen the developments regarding generative AI before. Something very similiar happened a few years back, when neural networks lead to a big jump in the quality of machine translation output. Jobs in the translation industry have not been the same since, although the downward trend actually started a bit earlier than that.
I think it all began with the introduction of CAT (computer-aided translation) tools in the early 90s. These dissect texts into small chunks, often on the sentence level, and save them together with their translations in a database. If a similar segment shows up in a later text, the software fetches the previous translation and suggests using all or part of it, potentially saving the translator time and increasing their productivity.
Translators could now translate more text in less time, and for freelancers, this could also translate (ha) into higher income. But big translation agencies had something different in mind: They would use the productivity boost to lower their prices and undercut the competition in the hopes of attracting more customers.
Obviously, competing companies would do the same, so the rates translators could realistically ask for entered a downward spiral. When neural networks and translation tools like DeepL arrived, there already wasn't much left to disrupt.
A translator's income is now laughably low even in my home country Germany, where the profession has traditionally been highly regarded. Your only chance at making a decent living in the industry is to be a very skilled freelancer who offers additional services that are not as easily automated or if you start your own translation agency and pay other translators pennies instead.
Most employed translators now work as low-paid project managers, coordinating the translation process between the clients and a pool of freelancers instead of translating anything themselves. Those who actually do translate texts often have to pre-translate them using DeepL or similar tools and then try to salvage the results.
The combined household income of two people working in the translation industry often won't even get them into the middle class. Instead of increasing prosperity, technological progress destroyed it.
I think something similar will happen to other industries due to the proliferation of AI-based tools, but maybe I'm comparing apples with oranges? I'm interested to hear what others think about this example. Maybe there's some hope after all.
As a sidenote, I do think that some of the damage to the translation industry could have been mitigated if the translators would have actually fought back instead of just accepting the terms dictated by the big agencies. Unions in Germany are still comparatively strong, and there's a huge trade union that would have helped translators fight for better working conditions if they had been willing to become members. But alas, I don't know a single one who did, apart from myself.