Translation is too complex - language changes too fast - cultural context can not me adopted well - see every translation app that tries other languages than the most common ones worldwide
Everyone thinks their own line of work is safe because everyone knows the nuances of their own job. But the thing that gets you is that the easier a job gets the fewer people are needed and the more replaceable they are. You might not be able to make a robot cashier, but with the scan and go mobile app you only need an employee to wave a scanner (to check that some random items in your cart are included in the barcode on your receipt) and the time per customer to do that is fast enough that you only need one person, and since anyone can wave a scanner you don’t have much leverage to negotiate a raise.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. The error you are making is assuming that there is a fixed quantity of work that needs to be performed. When you multiply the productivity of every practitioner of a trade, they can lower their prices. This enables more people to afford those services. There’s a reason people don’t own just 2 or 3 sets of clothes anymore.
When you multiply the productivity of every practitioner of a trade, they can lower their prices.
I’m sorry, but that’s some hilarious Ayn Rand thinking. Prices didn’t go down in grocery stores that added self-checkout, they just made more profit. Companies these days are perfectly comfortable keeping the price the same (or raising them) and just cutting their overhead.
Don’t get me wrong, if there are things they could get more profit by selling more, then they likely would. But I think those items are few and far between. Everything else they just make more money with less workers.
Are you sure self checkout is actually a labor-saving device? Does it actually save costs on net, once you factor in increased theft and shrinkage? Remember, just because companies adopt something, doesn’t mean it’s actually rational to do so. Executives are prone to fads and groupthink like anyone else. And moreover, this is a bit of an inappropriate example for two reasons. First, the demand for groceries is relatively fixed. Even if the price of groceries was cut in half, you probably wouldn’t suddenly double the calories you consume. Second, self checkout is a small marginal cost to the cost of goods in grocery and retail stores. Self checkout doesn’t improve the actual production process of the goods being sold in a store.
But I’m sorry, yes, you can cherry pick a few examples. But the general rule is and always has been that increased automation leads to lower prices. This is the entire story of the Industrial Revolution. People used to own only two or three outfits, as that’s all they could afford. A “walk in closet” was an absurdity 200 years ago. The clothing industry industrialized, and the cost of clothing was driven to the floor, completely contradicting what your model predicts. The 19th century textile barons didn’t mechanize production and then simply pocket the savings.
Hell, the only reason you can afford any kind of consumer electronics is because of automation. The computer, phone, or tablet you’re using now? It would cost 100x as much without automation. This is why niche electronics like specialized lab instruments cost so much money. If you’re only building a few of something for a tiny market, you can’t invest in large scale automation to bring the cost down.
Look at how quickly and dramatically the price of LiDAR has declined. LiDAR was once the purview of specialized engineering and scientific instruments. But because of driver assistance technologies, the demand for LiDAR has exploded. This allowed LiDAR manufacturers to invest in more automated production chains. They didn’t automate and keep charging the same price, as you would assume.
For an example of this in a white collar field, consider something like architecture. How many people actually hire an architect to custom design them a home? Very few. Most people buy mass produced tract homes. Tract homes benefit from a lot of automation and economies of scale, so they’re cheaper than one-off custom-built homes designed by architects. Yet if an architect could rely on specialized AI systems to vastly lower the number of hours required to design a set of home plans, they could charge less. Many more people would then be able to afford the services of an architect.
Yes, you can cherry pick a few examples of industries that have little competition or fixed demand, where they automate without substantially lowering prices. But even those big box stores with their automated checkouts are examples of automation lowering prices. There’s a reason the giant chains can charge less for products than small mom-and-pop shops. A giant grocery chain is big enough to invest in a lot of automation and other economies of scale that a small co-op can’t afford.
In some extent this is true and correct, but when it comes to automate individual thought and creation then ethical problems arise which should be looked at and asserted carefully and with dignity, because there should be boundaries on how much automation can extent in human life, in the end humanity does not compete with anybody except itself, we are humans trying to live and most of all communicate with each other, Jobs are also a way to communicate and socialise but as we already saw they try to take that away in any way they can.
And that’s a good thing, if and only if you provide pathways to other jobs or phase workers out slowly i.e. by retirement.
Or provide UBI to share the wealth generated by increased societal productivity
I have had a number of conversations with relatively reasonable conservatives, where I’ve brought up the dangers of so many jobs moving toward automation with no additional job creation. And steering the conversation carefully, I got them to at least consider the idea of UBI funded by taxing any and all automation. I also got them (with the “everybody should have to work, people shouldn’t get life handed to them for free” mentality) to agree that the rise in automation should mean people working less hours each, so everyone still has jobs (basically, UBI and changing “full time” to 25 or 30 hours, where people get overtime past that… creating more jobs while peoples needs are still covered).
It’s amazing, sometimes, how starting with some similar premises (people should have to work, which I mostly agree with) and shared threat (automation taking jobs) can lead to some more open minds for things that they would otherwise be adamantly against.
Technically speaking it’s opposite than in the picture. The professions replaced by robots in the picture are in fact not replacable because they require emotional awareness. On the other hand professions in the picture that represent humans can be replaced by robots because they only require data.
Teachers and physicians do not require emotional awareness?
House has proven time and time again that bedside manners don’t matter if you’re right. 😌
This is a mistake that many people will make, and it will be decades before they realize what they’ve done.
I teach elementary school. While most of the things I’m accountable for on paper are academic, most of my actual time is spent helping my students understand how to be functional humans. Problem-solving skills. Interpersonal skills. Self-control. Empathy. Self-esteem. In early grades, motor skills like how to hold a pencil or use scissors.
When we put a whole generation of kids in computerized AI schools (because it’s not really an “if” any more), we will see a huge effect in the real world, but probably not until after they graduate and have to start dealing with people in different work environments. And by then, we’ll be totally screwed.
Of course, the 1% will still have their kids in real schools with real teachers, because they already know that the very products they tout to the masses are actually detrimental to child development.
It’s because their parents need to go to work.
If we were not ruled by tech oligarchs, and the control & benefits of AI were not concentrated among a privileged few, AI replacing our jobs would be a good thing.
I genuinely wonder if at some point someone is going to try to replace my job with AI. I’d be surprised if it worked, but not surprised if anyone is dumb enough to try, considering I do IT work, physically onsite too, so I don’t just reset passwords over the phone or anything, I go to desks and setup equipment, repair hardware, troubleshoot software, the whole nine yards.
I work in horticulture and tend to plants- transplanting into different sized pots, pruning, yknow, physically interacting with plants. I also monitor the environment of the greenhouse- temperature, humidity, amount of water in the soil. Recently my boss has implemented ai and sensors to read the room and adjust the humidity and the temperature and monitor the water levels automatically. It doesn’t work very well, because there arent sensors evwrywhere, and some parts of the greenhouse get better ventilation than others, so the temperature fluctuates. Me and my crew know where the hot spots are, the robots don’t. The plants are suffering. We are doing extra work and killing off more plants on average than we did a few months ago.
About 1/3 of my crew has quit or been fired over the last year, and none of them have been replaced.
I’ve asked for a raise because I’m doing a lot more work with a lot less people, but they don’t have the budget for me, since we just implemented all this ai that’s gonna make my job so much easier.
I got written up for having a bad attitude (aka asking for a raise) and am now on probation at work. I am almost certainly about to lose my physical labor job to a robot and.it is blowing my fucking mind.
Take care xx
No job is safe from AI or robotic automation. They might not be able to do it well, but that won’t stop greedy and/or cheap businesses from trying.
Personal is a career?
I assumed it was supposed to be Personal Assistant, but the text got cut off.
The original meme this was copied from is Brazilian:
Probably a hallucination of the AI that generated this
I wanted robots to do my menial unpleasant chores for me so I’d have more time to do art, writing, and analytics. I didn’t want robots to do all the art, writing, and analytics so I had more time for chores & menial tasks 😭
“Personal?” Personal what?
We will never know, because this comic was produced by AI.
You’re one of several people saying this is from AI. I’m more familiar with the AI giveaways in text or fake photos, but not so much with comics. What makes this comic look so obviously AI generated to you?
This artistic style is specifically generated by ChatGPT 4o when you ask it to create a comic. You get a feel for it pretty quick once you have seen it a couple times, the same way you think “hey I’ve seen this artist’s work before”.
The text also looks generated - it’s too consistent to be handwritten, but too sloppy to be a font.
I definitely get generic kids book illustration vibes from it. Most of the comics I see tend to go for a more distinctive art style. I hadn’t even considered the writing, though. Thanks for sharing.
And it made a glaring mistake? Who will verify these errors to ensure they don’t occur? 🤔
Maybe we can make an AI-driven editing software!
The link you posted supports that it’s AI
The original comic wasn’t produced by AI, though.
Yeah, and this one was.
I’m presuming “personal assistant” and it got cut off due to being itself AI-generated slop.
Maybe it’s supposed to be “personnel”? HR hiring processes is dominated by bots now.
KOLANAKI
This is incorrect.
Give AI a few more years and ots a great teacher for adults.
Baker and lawyer? Easy. As soon as AI get capable robot bodies they can do “homemade food” with robotic efficiency. And knowing legal texts and such stuff? They are machines. Indexing, cross referenceing, contextually identifying and comparing large data will be super easy to them once they get more memory and no l9nger hallucinate information.
AI is in its infancy.
People who say AI won’t get as good or better than us humans at basically anything will be in for a hard awakening in about 10 years.
The humans are basically comparing their industry best against an AI baby learning to walk when looking at potential of growth.
You missed the point and wrote like 3.5 paragraphs. Maybe AI could summarise for you. I asked Gemini to give it a go:
This comic strip conveys a cautionary message about the potential overconfidence of humans regarding the irreplaceable nature of their professions in the face of advancing technology, specifically artificial intelligence. Here’s a breakdown:
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The first five panels show various people confidently stating that their professions (cook, driver, lawyer, doctor, teacher) are inherently human, rely on talent, and therefore cannot be replaced. They seem to believe they are immune to automation or technological disruption.
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The remaining four panels reveal identical, faceless robots labeled with other professions (personal, journalist, artist, translator). This visually suggests that even roles considered creative, nuanced, or requiring “human touch” are susceptible to being taken over by AI or robots.
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The humor lies in the dramatic irony. The characters’ confident assertions are juxtaposed with the stark reality of the robots, highlighting the potential for human hubris in underestimating the capabilities of emerging technologies. In essence, the comic warns against complacency and suggests that many professions, even those requiring creativity and human interaction, might not be as safe from automation as people believe. It prompts reflection on the evolving nature of work and the potential impact of AI on various fields.
I see.
Interesting then that I’ve seen such an very similar image used on reddit in the opposite way.
So perhaps thats why I expected it to be the same here
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Oh man is translation not possible with AI. You have no idea how little languages have in common. A lot of terms don’t mean a thing, but combine concepts you don’t have or associate to point at a thing.
My dad said, about learning a new language, ‘‘cat means cat, not gato, don’t translate’’ and I think that holds up pretty well from my experience.
You can’t be serious, buddy. I’m translating an entire episode with ai and it’s turning out better than the Netflix translation!
How could you even determine that? And if you have a translation available and you know what’s wrong with it, why wouldn’t you simply fix the mistakes? What do you need the AI for?
Spoiler
Netflix subs are often quite shit, so I don’t doubt that you could improve them, with or without the help of an LLM.
I worked for a huge software company who spent boatloads of money trying to to get AI to do translation, interpretation or localization and I can confirm with the absolute authority of someone who watched that dumpster fire first hand that AI will NOT be taking those tasks for a while.
If you’re not knowledgeable about the topic you should comment about it.
Your company must be very unsuccessful in this business.
I guarantee it outperforms whatever menial labor job you do.
Fucking Christ, dude. Chill.
If you’re not knowledgeable about the topic you should comment about it.
Has this also been translated by an AI, or am I missing the point?
You’re missing the point. You’re so woefully uneducated on the topic you don’t understand how Google translate was around for ages and didn’t replace interpretation, translation or localization. Why do you think that is? Maybe you should do some research there.
So, no one mentioned Google Translate. Are you guys seriously relying on Google Translate? Plus, your grammar is, uh, perfect.
No one said that AI was doing the jobs it’s replaced people in well.
Oh man is translation not possible with AI.
i mean, it’s pretty good at it? A lot of human translators even struggle with the same problem, the AI is just a lot faster, and significantly more versatile. That’s arguably one of it’s strongest areas of performance, is translation, because it’s so well suited to it.
You think it’s OK because it spits out grammatically correct language on your end, but if you spoke both languages you’d get how it fails. Look at translations of Korean comics if you’d like to see how badly mechanical translation is when it’s a connected story across multiple chapters, I was reading a comic where a character said he liked the elegant and sophisticated sound of calling a lightning strike skill ‘‘bolt’’ instead of whatever he was calling it ‘‘lighting strike’’ I think. It took me a while to realize what or whoever translated it didn’t know how to look at the context of the translation and find a English word that English speakers would find at least old fashioned if not archaic and of course longer or more poetic sounding. It’s like the whole thing when JRPGs can’t figure out if they should localize names by just spelling out the phonetic sounds in Roman letters or actually translating the meaning of the name, or a thing no one’s ever done and find a name in a European language family that has the same meaning.
Just like the AI art, it’s not replacing good translation, it’s replacing hack job translations, it’s replacing mediocre and predictable art. I really don’t care if someone uses AI in the pre-production or some post production functions, just not the part you need a human for, the actual creativity, there’s an adage in 3D animation ‘‘it you let the computer do it, it’s gonna suck.’’ You can let the computer do inbetweens, but you better be giving it nothing near a key frame. It has to really be the very least important frames.
AI currently completely does not understand the context of translation when it comes to visual media. Whereas a human translator can use that for additional interpretation
It’s still doing a consistently poorer job than a skilled translator, because it has no concept of nuance or tone. I encounter people getting themselves worked up over information in AI-translated news articles, so I go back to the source material and discover it’s mistranslated, under-translated, or just completely omitted parts of sentences. It’s very Purple Monkey Dishwasher.
The quality is better than it was a decade ago, sure, but that’s a pretty low bar. Back then it was gibberish, nowadays it’s natural-sounding phrases with incorrect translations.
And yet, translators are losing their jobs left and right, from what I hear. Sure, quality has gone down, but most people don’t seem to care. Plus, in a lot of cases, instead of the AI doing all the work, translators proof-read AI generated texts and correct the worst mistakes. Fewer translators can translate more at a lower price this way.
Does the quality still go down a bit that way? Probably. But again, who cares? Not the people spending money on translations, that’s for sure.
this is true, but for the average person, who just wants to translate something to make it make somewhat sense, it’s great.
Though yeah, you can’t really trust it, there’s a lot of intricacies.
You shouldn’t talk confidently on topics you’re ignorant on.
i’ve used the internet before bro, i think im pretty well educated on this one. Most people know more than one language, lol.
I mean given that “AI” are language models built on context and relations between words I’d argue that that’s one of the more applicable jobs compared to what’s listed in OP. With none of them is it capable of doing well, but I just wouldn’t argue that translation is outside that realm of what’s listed above
The problem is that the AI doesn’t understand cultural context. I dunno where you’re from so pardon me for assuming you’re likely an English speaker.
A good translation isn’t just to translate what the text says but to communicate the same idea to the reader or viewer within their cultural context. A good example is Disney’s Aladdin where Robin Williams improvised A LOT during the recording sessions and most of his jokes are full of contemporary American cultural context. I’m Danish and most Danish kids didn’t understand these American jokes so our translators decided to switch out some jokes with other jokes that conveyed similar points but within a Danish cultural context.
An AI cannot do that. It will translate what is written and it will be fucking nonsense to the receiver because they don’t understand the context or the references.
AI is only good at translating as long as what is written can be translated 1:1. And even then I sometimes wonder. Because as a Dane I have noticed how terrible Word is at Danish when it comes to corrections. It follows English language context and will underline correct words in red and suggest alternative that aren’t real Danish. For example, Danish words are slammed together while in English they are separated = skolelærer - school teacher. Word could very well decide to red line skolelærer and suggest to you that you should separate the word and make it two = skole lærer. But in Danish that would nullify the meaning. Now it is no longer a school teacher but a school and a teacher.
And I have seen on streaming services like Netflix and on steam how they lazily threw descriptions into a translator and it is just the most broken Danish I have ever read. It is so fucked because the newer generations of Danes who use these services are being influenced by them to learn incorrect Danish.
I have very limited trust in AI to do a better job at it since it isn’t Danish people that have trained it and it doesn’t understand our culture, our history nor how we communicate with one another. Everything that comes out of digital text based platforms from the US is our language filtered and massacred through US context. It is very very bad in my opinion and incredibly lifeless and soulless.
It would be the same the other way around btw. Me writing a piece of text with significant Danish cultural context and humor, slang and references would be translated into total nonsense for an English speaker, I’m sure.
Why is lemmy filling up with AI posts? Its worse that this is on c/comicstrips
It’s not a Lemmy thing, it’s a global phenomenon. Humans are using AI more than ever, and believe it or not, humans use Lemmy.
But its not a gradual change. AI posts used to be rare, in 2 days i found more AI posts outside of a community made for AI generated pictures than in the 2 years i have used lemmy
That’s because this is the first time AI comics have been passable. The quality simply wasn’t there before.
Yeah humans are still far better, but this could be considered “good enough”.
This isnt just comics. c/politicalmemes has so many ai generated images
Source? I’m not sure I’d want to be part of a community full of stink apes.
I think the point of this comic in particular is to show that AI is already taking over art but since it’s done badly, at what cost is it taking over these jobs?
When on c/comicstrips, i dont think its unreasonable for people to expect the art to be from real people
When I see these kinds of posts I just look over at the vibe coders and just laugh harder than any joke about ai taking our jobs
Except Vibe-Coders are kicking back & sipping margaritas & your job is still gone
I was extremely skeptical so I looked into it and it absolutely does not work. There was also a guy on YouTube who basically tried to make a Minecraft clone with Vibe coding and it just fell apart almost instantly.
All I was trying to do was get it to set up a basic scene in UE5 with some lighting effects and import a model of the building from the assets library. Nope, did not work. I didn’t even bother trying to implement game logic as it was so clearly a waste of time. The amount of time I spent trying to get it to do basic stuff, stuff that you would be able to do in UE5 after half an hour of training, I could have made significant progress on a gray box by then.
Lol. Vibe coders aren’t taking anyone’s job. There have always been shitty engineers and now we just call them vibe coders.
How safe a profession is depends on how much more expensive replacing robots are than replacing people
I ve seen robot in exbibition failing just because of working all day, never forget maintainace also
deleted by creator
But you’re living in capitalism. Unless government forces billionaires to fund social programs, they will just keep getting richer, just like it’s happening right now (if we ignore the crashing markets, but you get the idea)
That’s why we used to tax the morbidly rich at a 90% rate in the 50s
I not sure what personal is, but I’m curious, are there stats on job losses for artists, translators or journalist since AI?
I would use AI for some tangential stuff, like translating a menu, but not sure how many would use AI in a place where they’d previously hired a translator.
Jobs in journalism have been in decline for decades, the rise of AI is just another nail in the coffin of quality journalism. Hard to prove fault, but it’s not helping.