Category: Business

A new level of desperation by a Global South Linkedin user: Using AI to automate the process of clicking on click work

These days many freelance translators, post-editors, and anything-they-can-getters have apparently taken to sitting in front of their computers, constantly refreshing numerous click-work sites in hopes of both clicking before someone else and offering a low enough rate to get whatever scraps fall off the click-work table.

Today while scrolling through LinkedIn posts, I was presented with a post from a fellow in Cameroon offering a bot to automate the process, so now you can more efficiently catch those scraps dropped from the click-work table. Brilliant, just brilliant.

Click-work dependency didn’t start recently, and now it appears to be the normal method of getting work for many people even not in the Global South who formerly actually made a living by doing translation.

New LinkedIn-Based Business Plan

This business plan is predicated on a move to a Global South location, from which you can post on LinkedIn to advertise your coaching regarding:

  • how to succeed on LinkedIn (without feeling the need to explain what that might mean);
  • the differences between AI models (using pretty graphics to demonstrate the value you provide by bringing something that is obvious and easy-to-find elsewhere to the forefront in easy-to-understand terms);
  • how to prompt AI models (presented as the essential key to survival and triumphing over your rivals);
  • how translation is not the replacement of words in one language with those of another (a strawman argument presented in the hope that readers won’t realize that people with real money to spend on translation already know that);
  • how human translators are still needed because they understand and can bridge cultures (as if any more than a tiny portion of translation that is paid for has any cultural aspects or concerns);
  • how translators need to transform themselves to take on the new tasks, which it turns out are mostly training AI or fixing AI output at rates that you would only be happy with after you moved to and accustomed yourself to your new home in the Global South);
  • how to translate from any language to any language using AI;
  • how to do “digital marketing;” or
  • any combination of the above, preferably not promoted in the same post.

Then you just need to wait for the engagement and the money to roll in. Ain’t LinkedIn great? For what, you ask?