Toward the end of his life, Leon Trotsky wrote about how the revolution in Russia did not abolish capitalism, but rather established only one allowed capitalist left: either the state or Stalin. Trotsky was bemoaning the end of his political career, but if characters like Sam Altman could read, they'd recognize in this anecdote their own goal. At least with regard to the translation market.
I'd like to start by offering a thought experiment to the kind reader, and three options for how to check the quality of a received translation, particularly one by a chatbot. Option one is to ask a chatbot, the original one or another one. This is the police strategy of investigating yourself and finding no wrongdoing. An option only acceptable to the simplest among us. Option two is to ask a translator, who’s no longer able to ask for less than what the work is worth, regardless of personal desires, because the economy is what it is. Thus disappear any savings created by using a tool heavily subsidized by the US government, and time savings also sink to meaninglessness. Option three is to find a translator living in a well, who either doesn't know how much their labor is worth, or is intentionally underselling. I don't think such people survived the past 3 years, but if they did we can find them and deal with them as suggested toward the end of the essay.
There is a second way to look at the question of quality in translation. By definition, the commissioner doesn't themselves want to produce the work, but this disinterest doesn't have to be based in inability. Quality may be irrelevant, e.g. if the translation has to be created to satisfy laws, fully knowing the text will never be read by anyone. The commissioner may also simply not care what the result looks like, e.g. because the intended audience is tasteless. In each case we see a ratio of two factors: price and quality. If a capitalist decides that the price is so low as to be worth inferior, dubious or entirely unknowable quality, he'll choose it, every time.
This isn't a new problem. Before chatbots there was google translate, before that "my nephew who spent summer in London". Unqualified competition existed since the dawn of time. The results were similar, however until recently they weren't tied to sycophantic machines that cause psychosis and demolish critical thinking ability. These are value-adds for the managerial class, hitherto sorely missed. What has however remained constant through history is that this competition was always cheaper.
Walmart, Uber and similar companies all work the same way. They enter a new market, offer goods and services significantly below price. They do this until they run off all competition, at which point they're a monopoly, and can jack up the prices however high they like. They can undersell locals because they have outside money. Destroying small businesses and consolidating them in megacorporations is in the interest of megacorporations. There's a political dimension to this: there's always existed a conflict between democracy as an effort to spread power between more people, and the efforts of small in-group trying to centralize it as narrow as possible (but always with them inside that narrower circle). the political nature of small businesses is up for debate, but unquestionably a society with them is more democratic than one with paupers, megacorps and nothing in-between.
Such is the world dreamed of by Sam Altman, swirling in the oddly shaped skull of Marc Andreesen, and the publicly-avowed fascists Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, et al. They have not abolished language or the translation business; they just installed themselves as the only supplier in the biz, by underselling all others until they presumably die out. Translation will feed on itself like a turd-eating ouroboros, and renew its bloodline with its own product, doing to language the equivalent of the Habsburg family tree.
The repugnant pictures generated by programs owned by these people should not find success, but some people choose price over art, or rather as is becoming increasingly undeniable, were born without any feeling at all and weren't able to develop taste through their entire lives.
You'd be forgiven for thinking translations would be a simpler situation, seeing as how if I can't translate, I can't judge a translation, hence I need to hire a translator. The situation is similar and people without taste look exclusively for a cheap price. The result is that I have to see the ugliest pictures in the world (framed!) on the walls of otherwise acceptable cafes, and regularly encounter texts likely produced by a chatbot with no consideration for my time or the facts the text should be relating. There's also the matter I haven't had a good gig lately.
All of these are attacks against me.
My income is being strangled, whether by the perfect magical machine that truly 100% replaced me in my professional capacity, or just by underselling me, using US government subsidies.
My enjoyment of my surroundings is being strangled by a flooding of the real world (cafes), the virtual world (internet) with visual detritus. The communicative landscape I share with normal people is being turned into shit, because unbeknownst to the normies, the way they talk and think is being changed by the tools they allow into their lives.
Last but certainly not least, every god damn day the ruling class is given a big bullhorn to once more let it be known that ten million billion trillion jobs will be eliminated right next month, tomorrow, next week, and there's nothing you can do about it and you better get on board or get left behind and lose everything. That last part is simultaneously an actionable threat and an advertising for gambling. In either case the suggested course of action si that I give money to the same losers.
Seeing as how these are all attack against me, I submit to the court that acting in self-defense is warranted.
The first thing should of course be to inform the public. Now, of course I don't actually believe this is enough, or that it even works. I've established that (whether this has always been so or only started in the past 30 years) loads of people have no conscience, taste, an absolutely intuitive empathy towards other people, in summary: sense. Despite that, it should be pronounced clearly to the world: these tools destroy the environment, melt brains, produce disgusting garbage which to me is grounds for boycott on-sight, enrich the worst humans alive while causing nightmares to the poorest of the world and leave me, personally, inconsolable. If all this isn't enough for you, scroll down to point three below.
Secondly, it would behoove us to organize. Translators are making a huge mistake not unionizing. The biz fell for the same trap as IT workers in California, thinking that their power will last forever and trading independence for security is a bum bargain. Ben Franklin said something about that, but in this case they didn't trade anything for anything and lost it all.
Beyond that it would be smart to create a supranational umbrella group and from it push national laws, especially regarding 1 mandatory inclusion of human translators in translation and 2 minimum wages and underselling. New laws in Germany are supposed to mandate watermarks for deepfakes I propose that all translations ought to list the name of the responsible translator, who received pay no less than the minimum for it. If a scab accepts less, if a company left the whole thing to Sam Altman and his chatbot, this would be grounds for a lawsuit.
Point three is a straightforward appeal to justified self-defense. If someone drives by my house every day and shouts "I'll burn down your house", if someone's underselling on the market that I depend on for my livelihood, if someone -despite appropriately simplified explanation- perseveres in actions that lead to me being harmed, do I not have a right to intervene? Is it not my duty to firmly elaboration the causes and consequences of my sadness? Listing some clear examples of what might happen when things happen of which I am being convinced every day, will lead to my destitution? Would it help if I offered a demonstration?
I hope not to weaken the combativeness of the last section, but I want to write more about two things.
I started writing this for a narrower audience, to explain the main counterarguments to so-called AI, particularly regarding translation (what I hoped to do for a modest but stable living), in a way easily understandable to most. The money went down year after year, but only after the lockdowns ended did things really collapse. This is due to Sam Altman jumping into the class war with unfair resources.
If you use these things, I don't mean just for translations, but for anything, you're standing up on the side opposing me and all those like me. I don't think we can be friends. Out of cordiality to me, stop. Ideally, I'd like to never hear about any of this ever again.
Finally, I'd like to state that I am actually, sincerely convinces, that if "the economy" is a real thing and not a financialized fiction, and consequently money can't just be created out of thin air without consequence, then megacorps like OpenAI and Anthropic will not be in existence within 5 years. These companies are burning unbelievable amounts of money to run their hardware, and are the furthest from profitability a business has ever been. Uber allegedly at times subsidized 50% of every cab fare to conquer a market. Anthropic indicated they do around 96%! Ninety six per cent !!!
It's entirely possible that I'm wrong, that "the economy" is just an excuse, a magic word used to hide arbitrary behavior f the ruling class. If so, we have more pressing matters to attend to. But if not, this can't last. I am hopeful, that this torture will end soon, nobody'll say sorry for harm and injury caused, (with any luck they won't really be in shape to beg for mercy anymore,) and the world will, after a long downward trend, once more look a little less repellent.
All typos caused by extremely dried/cut up/taped fingertips. Ow.