It was a LinkedIn message that sent me over the edge.
An AI company was trying to recruit me to train their large language models ¡ª algorithms that can perform advanced processing tasks by ¡°learning¡± from huge datasets ¡ª in Japanese. The world of AI-generated text, art and music is endlessly fascinating, but as a writer and translator from Japanese into English, the sheer audacity of the message lit a fire in me.
It just hurt. The ruthlessness of trying to get professional translators to sell off millions of future yen to be earned in their careers for a few thousand yen today ¡ª and the chilling implications that cross-cultural communication between Japan and the English-speaking world might be run by thoughtless automated systems ¡ª sparked me to respond with an incensed message that .
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