It's never been about whether or not you like AI!

Let's be blunt about this: No one cares whether you like AI. It has been imposed upon us and we have to deal with it. And that's that. Some scientists predict that AI will take over the world while human beings will become redundant at best and dead at worst.😨

We all know that the translation world as well as the world at large is changing tremendously because of AI. As a translator and writer, when before AI I would be asked to translate a document for say 0.1 USD, now I'm told to proofread/edit the document for a mere 0.03 USD per word. I'm well aware that the documents provided have been 'AIzed'. This word still isn't in the dictionary but I'm sure it will come in no time. Processing documents with AI such as Chat GPT or Gemini is what most clients do to save money on translations. 

Before AI, I used to explain to my clients that proofreading and editing often take as much time if not more than actually translating. As any translator will know, this is because proofreading implies sticking to the translator's style while there can be so many mistakes that a rewrite would be a much more simple option.

But in this day and age, translators are mostly required to put some humanity and subtlety into a document. 

AI can never achieve emotional intelligence simply because it isn't self-aware, it has no volition. Such qualities belong to human beings. While AI may soon be able to mimic emotions extremely well, it will forever remain a cold, as in heartless computer program which is why it worries some scientists.

So whether you like it or not, AI is taking over the world, it has been doing so for quite a while already and it's going to move fast. Some jobs will disappear while as translators and writers we need to adapt.

I personally enjoy training AI so that it may seem more humane and user friendly. I do so in writing as well as in the spoken world. The training is still rudimentary with countless pages of rules and regulations to be read before being able to proceed. On a sideline, I'm really hoping that engineers will learn some teaching skills, i.e., the art of teaching something to someone as for the time being, AI training is more of a guessing game with countless pages of blah blah to be read, it’s very much like a user manual you may be trying to decipher (good luck, don't blow a fuse, I know how frustrating it can be...). I'm sure I'll be dealing with this topic in another post. It certainly deserves it!

So simply put, AI is here to stay while the poor feeble human beings that we are have been relegated to enhancing AI's capabilities. What can we do? We're either in the game or we are left out. There is no in-between. I'm not denying that AI can be put to good use. In fact it is in the medical field as well as in the written world. It can provide understandable translations, they may lack style and imagination but it does a decent job in some instances within a few seconds. The result is hardly professional but it isn't awful. 

I do worry about certain things about AI, such as the fact that it cannot differentiate between what's real and what isn't, this is called hallucinations in AI jargon, or between what has been written by a human being or a robot. This means that the information provided by AI can never be reliable and will become more and more unreliable as AI weaves its fake neurones into every corner of the Web. Which it is bound to do more and more. In the near future, AI will go online on our behalf while we shall chat to bots and simply ask our questions. 

I feel somewhat uneasy about the evil ways in which AI could be used. Something AI will never feel simply because it cannot feel. It's up to us human beings to inject values and ethics into Artificial Intelligence. We may be slow compared to AI, but we have natural intelligence, self-consciousness, volition as well as empathy, compassion, intuition and possibly even a soul. A world without such qualities would be unfit for life. If intelligence is the faculty to abstract then AI is indeed intelligent. But it lacks emotional intelligence.