Invasive Species

Although there are deniers and deluders, AI is clearly taking over. It has created countless members of invasive species of both non-human and humanoid creatures that do and say things that their counterparts in the real world never could do and never have said or will say. Some are modeled to resemble specific members of the dominant (as of this writing) real-world species. Others are generic AI avatars.

These species invaded by crossing the very narrow river separating the Internet and the real world. Most easily made it across by walking over the addictive bridge called social media.

It’s highly unlikely that many of these species will go extinct during the lives of people reading this. A more likely scenario is that they become even more skilled at impersonating humans from the real-world side of the river. Many humans are already fooled by them, to the extent they interact with them. 

Where will this end? Does anybody know? Perhaps more importantly, do many people perceive that this problem is more immediate than concern about some broligarch’s AI hacking some other broligarch’s system?

I have my doubts about many members of our species being that realistic, particularly when offered comforting views of the “world according to AI.”

Let the deluder beware. 

And, on the near horizon…

As freelance translation work from agencies dries up and is replaced by extremely low-paid mind-numbing AI repair work, people are now increasingly being targeted on LinkedIn and elsewhere by not only companies wanting them to train their AI, but also translation brokers promoting exciting new positions in quality assurance, claiming that this is where the future is. Such a post was suggested to me by LinkedIn today. They are barking up the wrong curmudgeon.

I posit that this is not where the future is, but where the end is.

You cannot repackage the empty shell of a career and expect intelligent people to be fooled. Well, perhaps you can, if the people being fooled are desperate enough, and many appear to fit into that category.

I hope this nonsense and deception ends and that more translators can wake up and do the necessary to survive, which, for most, will mean leaving translation for other endeavors.

フリーランス翻訳の終焉が見えて来た。

Content from carbon-based entities is losing out.

At an accelerating pace, AI-generated “content” is winning out over things written and created by humans. It accounts for a large amount of the content on many social media platforms, and a very large majority in places like the Reels section of the Facebook surveillance and manipulation platform. This even extends to LinkedIn, a platform that its owner, Microsoft, continues to purport is a business networking platform.

More troubling is the increasingly common sight of users engaging with AI slop as if it were real. I’m not referring to those sock puppet bots that make short comments or post reactions to such AI slop to fake up engagement, but rather accounts that look like actual human users.

Well, it doesn’t take much intelligence to purchase a smartphone, make a Facebook account, and retreat into a pseudo-life that avoids the real world.

People who prefer real life might consider escaping from the AI-centric confines of social media and venturing into—returning to, for many people—real life.

Some people might posit that a real life can coexist with an online life on social media. I would counter that people who spend hours making countless posts on social media and who go places and do things so that they can post those places and things on social media are missing out on a lot of what might be going on beyond the computer or smart phone screen.

Caller Non-ID

Because they can be spoofed, caller IDs are no longer meaningful.

We get some funny phone calls, none of which we actually pick up, but judging from the caller IDs and the voice mail, meaningful caller IDs are quickly becoming a thing of the past. 

“No ID” used to be the standard for thugs calling from places like Myanmar, but recently there have been incoming calls that are “openly Myanmar.” 

But then there are also countless calls purportedly from Docomo and other Japanese entities, but made from the US, Vietnam, and Pakistan.

But a phone call the other day from the Vatican put all those to shame. I should have pick it up, because I’m sure the pope had some very important things to discuss with me, probably involving crypto.