#which marx totally predicted btw

[clouds-of-wings]

Concerning the long-term implications of AI “art”, it may be that things will develop into the same direction in which they went in a different creative field that has already been transformed by AI, which is translation. Now, everyone who isn’t a complete idiot knows that you can’t feed your website or book to Google Translate and expect a great translation. You need human eyes to make sure the robot hasn’t confused turkey the bird and Turkey the country again, though admittedly newer translation systems are getting better at that. But what is pretty standard in translation today is a set-up in which an AI translates and a human proofreads. That’s much faster and it uses the strengths of AI (speed, price) and humans (accuracy, common sense).

It also fucking sucks for the human.

I used to work as a freelance translator. I cannot begin to describe how absolutely mind-numbingly boring it is to proofread machine translations. Everything that makes translation fun and a labour of love gets obliterated.

See, when I want to translate something, no matter whether it’s for money or for free (which I still love doing), I usually read some paragraphs first that are written in the style I’m going for and in the language I’m translating into. For pro jobs that was generally German because you generally translate into your native language(s) exclusively, but I was also sometimes hired to translate into English. It’s important to get into the right frame of mind, activate the right style of language in your brain. Once you delve into the text, it becomes a self-sustaining momentum since your own output constantly re-trains you to stay in the same style.

But that also means that when you proofread bad prose for hours, your style becomes consistently worse. You eventually start to think the same way as the text you have in front of you. If the style is inconsistent, if there are often words that... you know, aren’t completely wrong but have the wrong connotations, if the style is just not great, then your style won’t be great either. And you will know, but you can’t really change it, at least not without constantly “re-setting” yourself by taking a break and reading something written by a good human writer, which is time-intense and no one’s gonna pay you for that. It happened to me sometimes that I read the translation first and then didn’t understand the original anymore because the translation was such a word salad. When I have translated a difficult and complex text on a topic I understand well, I feel accomplished and energized. When I have proofread bad prose on the same topic, I feel exhausted and annoyed.

Proofreading machine translations is a slog. It’s not fun, it doesn’t produce especially good output - it does produce ok output quickly and cheaply, which is usually all that the customer wants, but at the cost of the translator’s misery. Unfortunately, I can see the same thing happen to professional illustrators. They might routinely get some AI output and be told to “fix it”, make the faces in the picture not look like potato salad, paint over watermarks (lol). Which will be cheap, and convenient, and make artists miserable the same way machine translation is making translators miserable. Because there’s no creativity involved, no sense of creation, you just clean up after the machine, knowing full well that the output is mediocre at best. The dominant system seems to transform every line of work into a sweatshop somehow...