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The safest job from AI may be writing

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Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#181

Post by roskoe »

fluoridation wrote: post #167
adrianN wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what share of translation dollars are non-formulaic content? To me it seems that there are tons of manuals for dishwasher and such to translate (where from my experience quality basically doesn't matter) and only a limited amount of diplomatic communiques.

Manuals have been machine-translated for ages, well before algorithms were anywhere close to ready for the task. No change there. >a limited amount of diplomatic communiques With zero data to support it, I'd bet good money the vast majority of semi-professional translators (that is, those not employed by publishers but still making some money off of their work) work on fiction, translating comics, subtitles, etc. Act…

> not employed by publishers

Full time professional, 20 years of experience.

Keep in mind that 99% of translators are freelance. Translating something takes only a fraction of the time it takes to write the original, so publishers only have full time project managers and editors and hire translators per job as needed.

Engines like Deepl do give very good results on some single sentences. After all, they are huge databases of previous human translations, they are bound to nail it here and there. Where it falls apart is in keeping a good average and a consistent voice, so either you leave it all as messy AI sludge or you rewrite it substantially (at which point it's a glorified dictionary)

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#182

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

elzbardico wrote: post #146
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #22

I don't think there's any chance people will be employed to sell the output of their brains in 20 years, outside of "athletes", or whatever we end up calling people who think for sport. We mostly succeeded at doing this with muscles, and today there's no market for hauling rocks out of quarries manually. We're in the process of doing that for brains too. AI will outdo people in all practical uses. We're already there…

And why would we accept this passively? For one, I will be in the hills with my rebel "compañeros" should things get that bad.

If that's how you feel, you'd better get started -- we've already got AI writing most of the posts on this site, handling frontier maths, writing most of the commercial code at most startups, and its capabilities are growing real fast.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#183

Post by AlbertoGP »

deepwoods wrote: post #131
mrweasel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copywriting struggles with the issue that businesses know they need it, but they don't value it. It's absolutely shocking to see how poorly companies, and governments, communicate and no amount of AI/LLM usage will change it. For decades it's been neglected and relegated to "cover my ass"- writing. The majority of AI deployment in businesses could have been avoided, if more attention had been placed on good communica…

I am not a writer but I do have to write a lot for work. The person who used to edit things for me has not been replaced, and I am expected to use AI. It is very good, but it's not all the way there. I am now left to decide whether to take the time to do it right or to go back to doing what I actually get paid to do. I wish my organization realized how important both sides of that decision tree are: we really ought t…

> The person who used to edit things for me has not been replaced,

I assume you meant "now" instead of "not": "The person who used to edit things for me has now been replaced,"

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#184

Post by nottorp »

pshirshov wrote: post #111

No. Below is my emotional opinion based on my own experience: Currently the models are totally helpless with plot and emotions. They make epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes. But: They are very good in finding _your_ epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes. They are great as adversarial reviewers. They can validate grounding. They can test voices. They can build complex parallel reconstructions representi…

> A so-so writer with a good model and a good approach to prose development could produce epic stuff.

Well, there have been hugos/nebulas awarded to "creative workshop" quality work before (and i mean before LLMs). But that doesn't make those books "epic".

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#185

Post by debugnik »

vbezhenar wrote: post #166
debugnik wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got some heavy reader friends and they keep complaining that many of Spains's fantasy book translations are ridiculously bad and blatantly machine translated now: Senseless terms that require looking up the original to understand, e.g. "fall" translated as in falling when it meant autumn; proper nouns, including character names, sometimes translated sometimes not; and many sentences that mix up the grammatical g…

How is it possible? Even if you just put text to ChatGPT it'll translate it much better than that. And with actually decent harness, the translation should be quite good. Do they even save on tokens by choosing cheapest model or something?

It's impressive how bad it is even for machine translation, I've seen examples. You're imagining them using a good LLM and a decent harness, but I'd bet it looks more like an intern copy-pasting snippets through an LLM or even just Google Translate and cleaning it a bit.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#186

Post by Symbiote »

fpoling wrote: post #130
dragandj wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They DO vote with their wallets, though. They're still buying that crap, don't they?

Unfortunately the answer is no. Reading or just owning a book by a certain author can be a matter of fashion or prestige. That allows for really bad work still be published.

If it's just for prestige, they should buy the original (English?) version and get even more prestige.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#187

Post by imtringued »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #56
metabagel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be creative superstars.

Of course. But they're going to be machines. I don't think there's magic that makes the human brain impossible to automate. And engineering is going to lead to faster improvements than evolution could.

You're ignoring a much more mundane problem.

What makes you think that there are economic incentives to build an AI that has the same capabilities as the human brain?

The current scaling story is to intentionally take a system that objectively doesn't and sell it as if it does.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#188

Post by mrweasel »

ilamont wrote: post #125
mrweasel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copywriting struggles with the issue that businesses know they need it, but they don't value it. It's absolutely shocking to see how poorly companies, and governments, communicate and no amount of AI/LLM usage will change it. For decades it's been neglected and relegated to "cover my ass"- writing. The majority of AI deployment in businesses could have been avoided, if more attention had been placed on good communica…

> It's absolutely shocking to see how poorly companies, and governments, communicate and no amount of AI/LLM usage will change it. Thank you for saying the first part. It truly boggles the mind to see how badly most organizations communicate, even those with professional staff tasked with communications. Regarding the second part: AI/LLM usage will lead to improvements for some people/organizations, if only for the s…

> and empower staff who weren't good writers.

That's the part I question. You have to be a really good communicator to put yourself in the place for the reader and adjust your language to your target audience. So much of "professional" communication fails because the language assumes that the recipient is knowledgeable or even just interested. If you can't communicate effectively on your own, I doubt that you can prompt the LLM to do it for you. It's going to be very much like development, if you're a skilled developer, LLMs are a massive boost to your productivity, but if you can't code, you're just producing garbage.

AI is going to produce an increase in communication, but that is not what we need. We need better and more targeted communication. AI doesn't need to help with the targeting, we can already do that, and do it cheaper than an LLM, and again, I don't believe the majority of people are able to prompt the LLM to generate better communication, because they don't know what that looks like.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#189

Post by pshirshov »

nottorp wrote: post #184
pshirshov wrote: post #111

No. Below is my emotional opinion based on my own experience: Currently the models are totally helpless with plot and emotions. They make epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes. But: They are very good in finding _your_ epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes. They are great as adversarial reviewers. They can validate grounding. They can test voices. They can build complex parallel reconstructions representi…

> A so-so writer with a good model and a good approach to prose development could produce epic stuff. Well, there have been hugos/nebulas awarded to "creative workshop" quality work before (and i mean before LLMs). But that doesn't make those books "epic".

You can write an epic piece and never reach any sort of broad audience. Not mutually exclusive.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#190

Post by adrianwaj »

"As AI slop saturates the web, with the same token (pardon my pun), the economic value shifts entirely to an authentic human voice."

In that respect, I'd be more than happy to read more direct quotes from Gemini and then read what a live hacker's take is on it. Slop provides the building blocks, and humans are the alchemists. Need both.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr... (not many returns for the last month, most are from me)

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