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AI won't take your job, might shrink your wages, European Central Bank reckons
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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The best part is, the MTPE workers' output is 100% going to get fed back into the algorithms, so it's only a matter of time before the average error rate of the models is good enough that there's no real reason to pay anyone to look at it.
People are, I think, overly optimistic that AI won't eventually take their job. Why the hell do people think their boss wants to pay them plus pay for an AI? When they can, they'll just switch as much as they can over to AI. We have a quantifiable error rate/range of error rates for most tasks, so all they have to do is create a model with an average error rate lower than, say, most people, and the case for employing us to even review their output goes out the window. It's not like humans don't make mistakes, so in reality, we 100% are in competition with AI for every task category. AI doesn't have to be perfect to make us obsolete, it just has to be overall cheaper with an "acceptable" output quality.
In fact, businesses often accept tradeoffs in quality in exchange for cost savings, so AI doesn't even have to get better at something to replace us. If it costs 1% and is 80% as good, and that 20% drop in quality isn't enough to affect their bottom line, you can bet your ass that humans won't be doing that job anymore. I've already seen comments from copy writers about how they lost clients to ChatGPT on exactly these grounds. ChatGPT.
Technology development takes a long time, I'm thinking 30-50 years out here, but the point is, this is a different kind of technological development than earlier ones. Future generations might, in fact, not have jobs at all.
Not quite, yes and no. It will be ever so slightly off, and the slightly off gets fed back, and language will change. It is already happening since CAT tools introduced segmentation - which means texts were segmented, and thus translated, at sentence level. Where a human translator in front of an unaltered text would have joined some sentences and separated others in the translated text, one tends to stick to the segmentation when working in a CAT tool, and MT- and CAT-translated German sounds almost, but not quite, like human German - remember that beverage machine making tea in the Hitchhiker's Guide? Only we got used to drinking the stuff and reading the texts, what can we do.
And now you have the added feature of MT flavoured translated texts. I for my part really enjoy handmade things these days, fuck AI. I thought AI generated images were funny at first, then understood the computation needs involved, the intellectual property stolen and put to work for corporations, the implications for many digital workers ... it's just more awful than fun honestly and should just fuck off back into the arseholes of the thieving scammers who invented it.