If AI is a helpful first-step tool for professional translations, and I very much doubt it is, the professional translators can use it themselves.
When hiring a professional, let them be the professional, which includes letting them choose their own tools.
If privacy issues could be addressed, I could *theoretically* see AI as a useful tool to digest a large transcript—but only after I’ve done it myself first. With careful human verification, an AI chronology might help me catch stuff I missed, but to rely on AI as a starting point is madness.
It'd need to get a lot better. I have been unimpressed with plot summaries, etc., that I've seen, especially of anything where there aren't many existing examples it can mulch into an averaged slurry. The less data it can draw on, the more it fills in the gaps randomly, like DNA in Jurassic Park.
The privacy concerns are also real. It would be beyond horrible to feed a detailed transcript about a sexual assault (with names!) into a system siphoning off information to turn into other stories..
Isn’t there a federal law keeping a lot of domestic relations stuff off the net?
Maybe 20 years ago, a retired Cincinnati Reds player’s soon-to-be ex-wife dumped a lot of his tax records onto the clerk’s public system. DR stuff quickly was required to go offline here.
Translators like myself already have machine translation and other computer tools. My workplace is exploring ChatGPT, and I approach it all with deep skepticism.
I worked for a computer consulting firm in a former life, and nothing's made sense on the cutting edge of IT since the Netscape IPO.
I suspect we're about to see a flood of "translators" offering their services for cut-rate prices, who just run documents through an "AI" and do very minor cleanup on the most obvious errors. (Heck, they might just get an "AI" "editor" to do that!)
