Good. Poison the well, fuck this toxic industry. Burst the bubble.
As a user that agreed to AI training data off my convos, I am doing my part.
That’s fine, so long as your part involves poisoning the data purple monkey dishwasher.
Be the change and sign up for one of those services to help teach AI
“If these companies want quality data, then they should offer quality contracts,” Alice continued. “Instead they’re low-balling struggling people, employing them for the barest possible amount of time and tossing them aside as projects are finished with no warning.”
Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Or minimum viable product for that price range, if you want to put it more fancy.
This is very important. I’m in a situation where the work I used to do is supposed to be taken over by the shitrobot. On a job platform now 15% of the job offers are the original work, 85% is AI slop fixing in one way or another. This led me on a 2-year odyssey of trying manual work (too weak), being really poor (getting better at that), and finally deciding that if I’m forced to serve the shitrobot to avoid starving I’ll serve it badly. Btw so far I’ve managed to avoid these jobs, may it remain so.
That said, if you are in need of a real human translator for tech or creative EN-DE projects do contact me, I’d be glad to keep doing work that makes sense!
For some time I worked for Microsoft on their Copilot AI (outsource, I did not know I was signing up to work for Microsoft).
I cannot tell you how many good translators Microsoft hires just to rate Copilot’s responses in various languages. They often had interesting insights to share, but whenever I asked my managers where to put it, they said we don’t care. It’s just rated 1 to 5, and that’s it. Nobody even cares about language-specific nuances.
Technically none of the translators are ever ‘hired’, let alone ‘employed’. All the work is based on shit contracts through several proxies. Some people weren’t even sure that they were doing work for Microsoft. Hell, as a junior manager even I never had contact with anybody from Microsoft. Only our seniors.
It’s an overall incredibly depressing environment. Very knowledgeable and passionate people still try to do their jobs as well as possible and provide insightful feedback, despite the fact it’s supposed to completely replace them. Only to be ignored and ghosted when a given language is deemed not worth the cost by microslop.
I was literally the only person who ever responded to translators labeled as no longer useful. Even though they still had their contracts active. And I know that, because several of them told me that. Nobody else bothered to even respond as people asked for any available jobs when struggling to make a living.
Our company decided to build our own ai translation system because the human translators we’ve been hiring started using AI… Quality dropped immensely, trust is lost. CEOs don’t feel like shopping around. So sad.
Here’s the thing: human translators have been using ‘AI’ for over a decade. It used to be called machine translation, and for anything but the dumbest stuff it’s a dumb idea, first nail in the coffin of translation. Translation agencies loved the shite, of course, because they could now pay a translator 0.05€ per word instead of 0.10€, arguing that now the same work took less time (it did, and also a lower quality translation was produced with a lot of costly bullshit software in the middle). The translators, as is to expect, hated it, but were forced to accept it or starve. We are now very slowly reaching the point where we are hired back as esteemed professionals after AI-caused communication mishaps and business fuckups keep piling up …
I’ve got a friend who used to translate for the U.N.
Sometimes you do not want to mess up that translation and it’s worth any price.
Imho nothing wrong with AI use by professionals, as long as it’s verified. That obviously wasn’t the case.
I went from mobile apps programmer to school bus driver. 100X happier even if I make 1/6 what I used to.
I’ve heard of people leaving perplexity because the CTO is strongly encouraging devs to use AI vibe coding and not waste their time manually reviewing the code themselves. Sounds like a shit show.
AI: OMNOMNOM this salt is fucking delicious.
Uranium salt? I hear it gives you extra strength. Or an extra arm. Whatever.
I prefer salt of saturn
sanitation — the part that doesn’t get said enough here: this was structurally inevitable. Piece-rate annotation contracts reward volume, not quality. If you’re getting paid $0.08 per labeled example and GPT-4 can produce 50 in the time it takes you to write 5, the rational move is obvious. It’s less ‘ironic lesson’ and more ‘predictable tragedy of misaligned incentives.’ The fix probably isn’t better monitoring — it’s redesigning the task so high-quality human signal is the only thing that clears the bar (adversarial examples, edge-case disambiguation, stuff LLMs genuinely can’t fake). We built some thinking around data-quality verification for exactly this kind of pipeline, more context at https://cxgo.ai/l/5LGqWHi if it’s useful for anything you’re working on.
How did they not see that coming? AI could have been a handy tool as a wingman handling small, repetitive tasks. Instead we get a giant mess that expensive and not terribly useful. To me it’s like EVs. Which would have been great second around town cars until the infrastructure could catch up.
Would have been? EVs are exactly that. They’re great. Ones with range can easily replace cars with internal combustion engines for most use-cases. Usually costs me about $5 a month to keep mine charged.
Fully agree on LLMs being expensive messes that aren’t very useful, though.
Not the above poster, but I would say the cost. Modern EVs are designed to replace cars, and so cost the same or more, while being not quite as convenient for long trips.
We could have all had lightweight, city-speed but cheap, short-range EVs for a decade or two already if that was the approach taken. The battery requirements for 60kph and maybe 100km of range are super minimal, even before you go lighter. Like an order of magnitude smaller.
Might have worked if the street infra and laws allowed it. Would have been super tough to pull off at the start, and a lot of people lack the parking for two different vehicles. I do remember some companies trying these, but there’s no where appropriate to drive them.
I feel like you are describing the Nissan Leaf. Bought one used in like 2017 for $12k and it could only do like 80 miles on a charge but that’s more than enough to get to work and back. Cost about $1 of electricity per 100 miles (apologies for freedom units)
