Comment by muvlon

10 hours ago

There may well be some writing jobs that are safe for the reasons given in this post, but that doesn't help all the writers I know who have already lost their jobs and are struggling to find work.

It's not enough that humans can tell the difference and feel an ick, there also need to be enough organizations willing to pay money for that difference. From my vantage point, there are not. It turns out that for a ton of the writing produced by companies, the quality of the prose wasn't really "load-bearing" as Claude puts it. That writing is there to occupy a space and look professional at a glance, the same way elevator music is tolerable for the duration of an elevator ride.

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muvlon

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TFNA  8 hours ago

I have worked in the publishing industry, translation and editing (got out to a more dependable career just in time), and what is astonishing is how even "load-bearing" text is not safe from the cost-cutting pressures. That is, even some respectable publishers for the last several years will publish a book one is expected to pay good money for, with minimal editing and proofreading compared to the old days, and if it is an originally foreign book, with machine translation and minimal post-editing.

  • debugnik  7 hours ago

    I've got some heavy reader friends and they keep complaining that many of Spains's fantasy book translations are ridiculously bad and blatantly machine translated now: Senseless terms that require looking up the original to understand, e.g. "fall" translated as in falling when it meant autumn; proper nouns, including character names, sometimes translated sometimes not; and many sentences that mix up the grammatical gender because the machine wasn't given enough context to infer it.

    But these publishers don't get punished because they keep licensing popular foreign franchises, which aren't quite fungible, so consumers don't want to miss out and thus don't vote with their wallets.

    • vbezhenar  3 hours ago

      How is it possible? Even if you just put text to ChatGPT it'll translate it much better than that. And with actually decent harness, the translation should be quite good. Do they even save on tokens by choosing cheapest model or something?