I have a friend who used to do book translations. Due to some craftsman union rules, the minimum rate for translations has been set (and of course that's what everybody pays). Machine translation didn't decrease these rates, but they haven't been increased in 15 years, which made inflation completely eat it up.
Initially machine translation was way worse (by professional standards) than people assumed, essentially useless, you had to rewrite everything.
As time went on, and translation got better, the workflow shifted from doing it yourself to doing a machine pass, and rewriting it to be good enough. (Machine translation today is still just 'okay', not professional quality)
On the initially set rates 15 years ago you could eke out a decent-ish salary (good even if you worked lots of hours and were fast). Today if you tried to do the work by hand, you'd starve to death.
Sorry for replying to my own comment but I had a separate thought - this is how I feel about LLMs today.
While they help with programming, I feel like the scope of my tasks have increased over time as well. I feel like this is happening to me - I'm insanely more productive and my tech stack has increased hugely over the past two years as has my productivity.
But I don't make significantly more money, or get a ton more recognition, it's just accepted.
>Machine translation today is still just 'okay', not professional quality
"okay" is an overstatement. It's "readable" if you put in triple the effort needed to read proper native language. But you're doing a lot of work re-translating machine languae in your head to understand it.
I guess for businesses that's "good enough". Very few products ever truly get lambasted for bad localization.
Also illustrators, voiceover artists and customer service agents. Commercial photographers have seen their income from stock image services collapse and they are now seriously worried about the impact Nano Banana will have on work like product and fashion photography.
The question is no longer whether AI will put people out of work, but how many and how quickly.
- OCR eat a good chunk of data entry jobs,
- Automated translation eat a number of translation jobs,
- LLM have eaten quite a few tier I support roles.
I don't have numbers tho, maybe people are still doing data entry or hiring translators on mechanical turk.