"In an interesting—and rather telling—wrinkle to the AI boom story, many translators noted that generative AI didn’t usher in any revolutionary improvement to already-existing technologies that have been used to automate translation for years. Long before AI became the toast of Silicon Valley, corporate clients had been pushing lower-paying machine translation post-editing (MTPE) jobs, or editing the output of AI translation systems, though many translators refused to take them. Others said Google Translate had long been able to essentially what ChatGPT does now.
Yet many describe a dramatic disruption in wages and working conditions over the last two years, coinciding with the rise of OpenAI. Though my sample size is small, these stories fit my thesis that the real AI jobs crisis is that the drumbeat, marketing, and pop culture of "powerful AI” encourages and permits management to replace or degrade jobs they might not otherwise have. More important than the technological change, perhaps, is the change in a social permission structure.
Not one but two accounts detail how many translators dismissed ChatGPT at first, because they’ve heard companies tout many automation technologies over the years, all with limited impact—only to see the floor drop out now. And it’s not that ChatGPT is light years better than previous systems (lots of post-AI translation editing is still required), it’s just that businesses have been hearing months of hype and pontification about the arrival of AGI and mass automation, which has created the cover necessary to justify slashing rates and accepting “good enough” automation output for video games and media products. Everyone else is doing it, after all.
Yet much stands to be lost, even aside from decent wages and the livelihoods of the translators and interpreters who help make our cultures better understood."
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-my-job-translators