I’m from the 90s and I share the feeling. How did we get here? Tech was fun and nice and cool, then it all became samey and locked down and on the cloud. Cars all look the same too. Maybe it’s capitalism that’s reached a stage where to get more profits it can’t just create more value so it tries to super optimize what’s already there but doing so it removes the little joy and whimsy there was ? Or maybe it’s for control ? Thinking out loud here, I don’t know. But this age is so depressing.

To clarify one important thing though: I am not a scientist or an expert in the area. I’m a translator by trade, and since I couldn’t find anything related to this, I decided to try and write my own paper. I learned how to do it when I was still a student but it’s a while back and I don’t have the resources or institutional backup to carry on my own experiments. I’m simply trying to find evidence and synthetize it. My hope is 1) that it interests people and get them to think about it and 2) maybe in those people I got thinking, there will be actual researchers with the means to do that properly.

I’m currently studying and gathering studies about language and cognition to see if LLMs could do anything to our culture. So far I’d lean to say that, yes, they could curate our words and thus alter the way we speak, write and think. Words are linked to our perception of reality somehow and given enough time our overlords could curate words they like, shadowban others and in that way interact with what we can communicate and think about.

Obviously there is a large group of people rejecting AI so they wouldn’t suffer from this.

My service cost money and chatgpt was free. They all took the person that was interfacing with the multiple linguists and put that person in charge of asking the translations to chatgpt.

They lost in quality, quality control, cultural fitness of the message, creativity. But none of them cared and they just started pasting texts into chatgpt.

It’s not just me either. Projects are multilingual so there can be dozens of translators working on a given project. We all tried to reason and explain why that was stupid as hell.

But money saved is money so they did it anyway.

Initially I tried looking for new clients but the once buzzing world of translation was a ghost town, no one was asking for translation services anymore.

Some people don’t do AI for money, there’s a subgroup that thinks they are helping by doing the prep work with AI so we can deliver to them faster . That’s easier to work with because they usually understand when we explain why it doesn’t help at all.

Too late. Didn’t have time to prep backup plan, clients all went AI. Now I’m job hunting like a 15 years old trying to figure out what I can do with my skills now that everyone thinks they can be great at anything using Large lying models.

I’m a translator, so different type of gen ai but also heavily impacted. Here’s the thing, I enjoy translating with my brain and soul, finding nicely written stuff. Ai is flat, idiotic, makes mistakes but wrapped in a believable enough package that it’s hard to spot the errors.

So instead of spending an hour translating, I would spend ten minutes translating, then a random amount of time proofreading and looking for hidden mistakes, find stupid sentences translated as is or even sometimes saying the opposite of what it should be, and then spent a huge cognitive load on fixing that without breaking the barely good enough rest of text.

It’s usually not faster, or not by much, but it sucked all the pleasure out of the job by making me do another type of task.

Oh and the rates for ai translation is not even half that of human translation.

I personally chose to shut the business because I really wasn’t a translator anymore and was earning less anyway.

Even if it were faster, this isn’t the cognitive task I learned and enjoyed, this isn’t my craft and there is no pride in fixing shit from Large lying models. So your days feel pointless like a hamster on a wheel. No amount of money would fix that and as I said it doesn’t pay well anyway.

Same thing for translation. They replaced us with AI and ask us to proofread and correct the mess for 1/4 the price. I stopped my translation career over this.

Hum. I’ve been smooth sailing for a while now. I’ve tried installing OwnTracks again and made some progress by figuring out cloud flare tunnels are a problem (at least the way I configured them). New to MQTT. So the app still doesn’t work properly but now I have an idea why and I’m not just banging my head on the wall anymore.