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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

#211

Post by HDThoreaun »

fluoridation wrote: post #159
matherial wrote: post #120

I strongly disagree, for reasons that are different from what's discussed in the thread. It doesn't matter if LLMs can't hold a candle to some of the finest human writing. What matters is that before you become a world-renowned writer, you need to pay your bills, often for a long time. And that's what LLMs take away. All the mundane literature-adjacent works: journalism, translations, technical writing / corporate co…

AI will definitely not take over translation for a long time. Machine translation has improved to the point it's mostly no longer incoherent, but for non-formulaic content it's still very hit-and-miss, not that much better compared to 10-20 years ago. For example, something they still struggle with is consistently translating terms coined within the text with consistent phrases. >A budding painter or a musician could…

Most paid translation work is just businesses that want to cover their ass so they don’t get blamed for a wildly shitty Google Translate. LLM translation is good enough for that. They’re not looking for art.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#213

Post by fluoridation »

matherial wrote: post #208
fluoridation wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will definitely not take over translation for a long time. Machine translation has improved to the point it's mostly no longer incoherent, but for non-formulaic content it's still very hit-and-miss, not that much better compared to 10-20 years ago. For example, something they still struggle with is consistently translating terms coined within the text with consistent phrases. >A budding painter or a musician could…

First, as others have said, a lot of translation work doesn't involve high-brow fiction. It's reference material of all sorts. Technical books, manuals, software localizations, etc. Second, you vastly overestimate the desire that book publishers have to pay for good translations. I've seen books from reputable European publishers that were (badly) machine-translated by a contracted translator keen to dig their own gr…

>It's reference material of all sorts. Technical books, manuals, software localizations, etc.

Yes, I covered that under "formulaic content". As I've already said, a lot of this was already done decades ago. East Asian manuals and copies using machine translation are kind of a meme. Human translators are not losing any work from this. These are all businesses that were never going to employ a translator to begin with; it was either machine translation or nothing.

>Second, you vastly overestimate the desire that book publishers have to pay for good translations. I've seen books from reputable European publishers that were (badly) machine-translated by a contracted translator keen to dig their own grave. Yes, Harry Potter will get a good translation, but 1,000 lesser books won't.

Well, you're not citing any examples, so you you don't give me much to work with. I haven't read a translated book in ages (I don't think), but I do move in circles where translations, human- and machine-made, are freely distributed, and people kick up a fuss over machine translations that they didn't even have to pay for. I can't imagine a paying reader being any kinder upon realizing that they're traded their hard-earned money for machine-produced nonsense. You yourself admit that the translator who does this is digging their own grave. How is this not a problem that corrects itself?

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#214

Post by fluoridation »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #211
fluoridation wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will definitely not take over translation for a long time. Machine translation has improved to the point it's mostly no longer incoherent, but for non-formulaic content it's still very hit-and-miss, not that much better compared to 10-20 years ago. For example, something they still struggle with is consistently translating terms coined within the text with consistent phrases. >A budding painter or a musician could…

Most paid translation work is just businesses that want to cover their ass so they don’t get blamed for a wildly shitty Google Translate. LLM translation is good enough for that. They’re not looking for art.

So they go for a wildly shitty LLM translation?

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#215

Post by HDThoreaun »

fluoridation wrote: post #214
HDThoreaun wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most paid translation work is just businesses that want to cover their ass so they don’t get blamed for a wildly shitty Google Translate. LLM translation is good enough for that. They’re not looking for art.

So they go for a wildly shitty LLM translation?

Theyll certainly go for something they believe is reliably mildly shitty, yea. LLM translation has largely solved the biggest issue machine translation had which was proper nouns. Its good enough for most business cases now

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#216

Post by cautiouscat »

BoredomIsFun wrote: post #199
cautiouscat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that constantly gets missed by HN in discussions about AI in the arts. There's the quality of the output and the essence behind the art itself. Humans want both [1][2] but these models only provide an output. Could ChatGPT output the next IT or Lord of the Rings , probably. However, once it's understood that it wasn't written by a human it loses all value. I use this quote by Kane Parsons a lot but…

> However, once it's understood that it wasn't written by a human it loses all value. Hmm...No. I actually enjoy generating short stories for myself - after light editing they are great; they are enjoyable irrespective of the provenance.

To you, yes. But if you were to send that out into the world and told people it was AI generated, do you think it would receive the same positive response you give it?

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#217

Post by debugnik »

dragandj wrote: post #121
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…

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

Since you can't really go buy the same work translated by a different publisher, voting with your wallet means boycotting it. I agree it would be the right option to punish publishers, but people find it frustrating to miss out on both the work they were hyped for and its fandom; the latter is a really big deal for those deep into reading subcultures.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#218

Post by ElProlactin »

esafak wrote: post #165
ElProlactin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that in the worst-case AI scenarios where a huge portion of the professionals who work "behind a screen" lose their jobs, the entire labor market will have to deal with that. There's so much focus in the US on vocations but Americans have no idea how little mechanics, plumbers, etc. in other countries make. There are a variety of reasons for this but one of the biggest is that you can't charge $200/hour to fix…

If white collar workers get laid off tradesmen are not going to be able to charge much any more either. Not to mention the price pressure that will accompany the increased supply of workers.

That's exactly what I mean. High blue-collar wages are dependent on white-collar employment and wages.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#219

Post by kazinator »

pants2 wrote: post #95

If I found the best human writer in the world, and had him write every article on the internet, wiping his memory between each one, his writing would start to get pretty noticeable and boring!

If that writer had consumed terabytes of text, and in spite of not perfectly memorizing all of it could quite accurately predict the next word from a sample of it, and still couldn't vary their word choice and sentence structure, something would be wrong.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#220

Post by BoredomIsFun »

cautiouscat wrote: post #216
BoredomIsFun wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, once it's understood that it wasn't written by a human it loses all value. Hmm...No. I actually enjoy generating short stories for myself - after light editing they are great; they are enjoyable irrespective of the provenance.

To you, yes. But if you were to send that out into the world and told people it was AI generated, do you think it would receive the same positive response you give it?

some folks at r/WritingWithAI some time ago mentioned that disclosing AI did not kill sales.
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