Author: William Lise

I am a long-term (50-plus years) resident of Japan, and former electrical engineer, and I have been translating and interpreting for over four decades here in Japan.

Denial & Delusion

The level of denial and delusion about the future of translation exhibited by many translators and even their organizations is truly impressive.

Many translators are wasting energy that could be better applied in efforts to find a survival path, which for most will not likely involve translation, and not even repair of AI-generated translation if they are not already financially independent or don’t need to eat or house themselves.

The post-editing task has been hyped by translation brokers and imagined by delusional translators as a more sophisticated role than “just translation.”

I call total bullshit on that and, in their hearts, most translators must realize that, but they can’t bring themselves to face it. 🪦

I am growing weary.

I am growing extremely weary of:

  • AI avatars used to sell products and services (even in places like Microsoft’s LinkedIn)
  • Companies and schools selling AI training to avoid “falling behind.”
  • People who think they can get away with using AI to write posts on Microsoft’s LinkedIn and elsewhere. They can’t; their attitude toward the task of writing is crystal clear.
  • People selling LinkedIn coaching and purporting to help you achieve “LinkedIn success” (whatever that is), hoping that their targets will believe that LinkedIn success means something.
  • People who defend their AI use because “everyone’s using it” to write and create “content.”
  • People who continue to deny that AI can replace them long after anyone who is not sleepwalking can see that it has already replaced countless highly capable people in the same profession.
  • People exploiting the current AI-caused existential crisis to sell coaching to their desperate colleagues in the same field. Desperation is widespread, and one strategy appears to be to focus on the coaching business.

Additionally, although it’s more a concern bordering on distress than an annoyance, we have a growing population of people who interact with AI avatars and other nonsense in cyberspace as if they’re real.
The growth of this delusional group does not bode well for the future of our species.

We have met the enemy, and we are theirs.

Because I have sometimes used a certain AI model—lately hardly at all, however, but I will not name it—it has my (non-business) email address, which is a free email address I could trash at any time, in the event that “push comes to shove it up your algorthm.”

Although I’ve never done this before, on a whim I responded to the model’s email notice to me today that it had a new image-creation feature, by having it create an image of me in one of the new styles it provides. All I provided it was a head shot of me. No prompting was provided.

That AI model has information about me, of course, from previous questions I’ve asked it, and also surely has vast amounts of information about me it has scraped from my business website and from other places in cyberspace.

It was able in about 30 seconds to create an anime-like still image of me from the head shot, and the AI-generated image of me clearly showed:

  • that I am a translator,
  • my company name (which was never mentioned in any prompts or questions in the past),
  • the specific kinds of translation I do, and
  • several other phrases demonstrating my attitude towards translation work.

Folks, we are owned by these disingenuous broligarchs, although it might be fairer to say that we have surrendered ourselves to them, but that doesn’t make things any better.

Numerous AI broligarchs have recently sounded the alarm, warning of the risk of AI taking over the world and killing people. Such a warning should be seen as a diversionary bargaining chip, in the hope that, if they can convince us they will prevent AI from killing people, we will settle for AI just sucking our souls dry and reselling them to us and others in a new form, after they have been subjected to the AI processing.

AI has given us things we don’t need, things we didn’t ask for, and things we could and should ignore without any FOMO concern. Oh, and no, you are not going to see that image of me the AI created, at least not from me. The AI broligarchs might have other ideas.