> The deeper risk is not that AI will replace historians or translators, but that it will convince us we never needed them in the first place.
I think the bigger danger would be that they'd lose the unimportant grunt work that helped the field exist.
Fields need a large amount of consistent routine work to keep existing. Like when analog photography got replaced by digital. A photo lab can't just pay the bills with the few pro photographers that refuse to move to digital or have a specific need for analog. They needed a steady supply of cat pictures and terrible vacation photos, and when those dried up, things got tough.
So things like translation may go that way too -- those that need good quality translation understand the need very well, but industry was always supported by a lot of less demanding grunt work that now just went away.
There are nice example how even after human input the translation misses things.
For example, the price of the fish was stated as 2.40 rubles. This is meaningless outside the context and does not explain why it was very expensive for the old man who checked the fish first. But if one knows that this was Soviet SF that was about a life in a small Soviet town of that time, then one also knows that a monthly pension was like 70-80 rubles so the fish cost was a daily income.
Then one needs to remember that the only payment method was cash and people did not go out with amount more than they would expect to spend to minimize the loss in case of thievery etc. and banking was non-existing in practice so people hold the savings in cash at home. That explains why Lozhkin went to home for the money.
> The initial draft was terrible in conveying tone, irony, or any kind of cultural allusion.
My mother reads books mostly in Russian, including books by English-speaking authors translated into Russian.
Some of the translations are laughably bad; one recent example had to translate "hot MILF", and just translated "hot" verbatim - as in the adjective indicating temperature - and just transliterated the word "MILF", as the translator (or machine?) apparently just had no idea what it was, and didn't know the equivalent term in Russian.
As a mirror, I have a hard time reading things in Russian - I left when I was ten years old, so I'm very out of practice, and most of the cultural allusions go straight over my head as well. A good translation needs to make those things clear, either via a good translation, or by footnotes that explain things to the reader.
And this doesn't just apply to linguistic translation - the past is a foreign country, too. Reading old texts - any old texts - requires context.
> Still, without AI a story like this would have taken me several weeks to translate and polish, instead of one afternoon.
I don't understand this. It's only six thousand words and it's the polishing that takes the time. How would it have taken weeks to do the initial draft?
One of the few articles about AI on the front page that doesn't make me want to throw my phone against a wall.
Haven't even read it completely, but in contrast to the countless submissions regurgitating badly thought-out meta arguments about AI-supported software engineering, it actually seems to elaborate on some interesting points.
I also think that the internet as a primary communication and mass medium + generative AI evokes 1984, very strongly.
This is a very tangential comment, but I read the short story (https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8eh2woz05ndfxinbf9vdh/Goldfis...) and loved it (took me around 15 minutes to read).
Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on the original author, Kir Bulychev, and saw that he wrote many short stories set in Veliky Guslar (which explained the name Greater Bard). The overall tone is very very similar to R.K. Narayan's Malgudi Days (albeit without the fantastical elements of talking goldfish), which is a favorite of mine. If anyone wants to get into reading some easily approachable Indian English literature, I always point them to Narayan and Adiga (who wrote The White Tiger).
On that note, does anyone else have any recommendations on authors who make use of this device (small/mid-sized city which serves as a backdrop for an anthology of short stories from a variety of characters' perspectives)?
Many historians work on manuscripts and/or large archives of documents that might not be digitized, let alone be accessible in the internet. The proportion of human knowledge that is available in the internet, especially if we further constrain to English-language and non-Darkweb or pirated, is greatly exaggerated. So there are infrastructure problems that LLMs by themselves don't solve.
On the other hand, people tend to be happy with a history that ignores 90+% of what happened, instead focusing on a "central" narrative, which traditionally focussed on maybe 5 Euro-Atlantic great powers, and nowadays somewhat pretends not to.
That being said, I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth advanced by the article. Maybe it's hard to positively establish facts, but it doesn't mean one cannot negatively establish falsehoods and this matters more in practice, in the end. This feels salient when touching on opinions of Carr's as a Soviet-friendly historian.
> But as Goethe said, every fact is already a theory. That’s why facts cannot save you. “Data” will not save you. There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out.
There may be no objective story, but some stories and fact theories are more rigorous and thoroughly defended than others.
I'm sorry, as someone who genuinely likes AI, I still have to say that I have to call bullshit on Microsoft's study on this. I use ChatGPT all the time, but it's not going to "replace web developers" because that's almost a statement that doesn't even make sense.
You see all these examples like "I got ChatGPT to make a JS space invaders game!" and that's cool and all, but that's sort of missing a pretty crucial part: the beginning of a new project is almost always the easiest and most fun part of the project. Showing me a robot that can make a project that pretty much any intern could do isn't so impressive to me.
Show me a bot that can maintain a project over the course of months and update it based on the whims of a bunch of incompetent MBAs who scope creep a million new features and who don't actually know what they want, and I might start worrying. I don't know anything about the other careers so I can't speak to that, but I'd be pretty surprised if "Mathematician" is at severe risk as well.
Honestly, is there any reason for Microsoft to even be honest with this shit? Of course they want to make it look like their AI is so advanced because that makes them look better and their stock price might go up. If they're wrong, it's not like it matters, corporations in America are never honest.
This whole article is based on misinterpreting Microsoft's "AI applicability score" for "risk of job being made redundant by AI". From the original paper:
"This score captures if there is nontrivial AI usage that successfully completes activities corresponding to significant portions of an occupation’s tasks."
Then the author describes their job qualitatively matching their AI applicability score by using AI to do most of their work for them.
If there's a lot of unmet demand for low-priced high-quality translation, translators could end up having more work, not less.
> History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do.
Well-put
> The deeper risk is not that AI will replace historians or translators, but that it will convince us we never needed them in the first place.
This is exactly what tech monopolies want. To make everyone forget about the alternatives to their products. Strip Newspeak down to the very bone. Eliminate the words for things they can't control.
> they are acts of interpretation that are never recognized as such by outsiders
And that is exactly why translators are getting replaced by ML/AI. Companies don't care about quality, that is the reason customer support was the first thing axed, companies see it only as a cost.
here's the paper this guy seems to be reacting to https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935v1
I agree and disagree. It's certainly the case that facts imply underlying epistemologies, but it completely misses the point to treat that like it entails catastrophic relativism.
Building up an epistemology isn't just recreational, ideally it's done for good reasons that are responsive to scrunity, standing firm on important principles and, where necessarily, conciliatory in response to epistemological conundrums. In short, such theories can be resilient and responsible, and facts based on them can inherent that resilience.
So I think it completely misses the point to think that "facts imply epistemologies" should have the upshot of destroying any conception of access to authoritative factual understanding. Global warming is still real, vaccines are still effective, sunscreen works, dinosaurs really existed. And perhaps, more to the point in this context, there really are better and worse understandings of the fall of Rome or the Dark Ages or Pompeii or the Iraq war.
If being accountable to the theory-laden epistemic status of facts means throwing the stability of our historical understanding into question, you're doing it wrong.
And, as it relates to the article, you're doing it super wrong if you think that creates an opening for a notion of human intuition that is fundamentally non-informational. I think it's definitely true that AI as it currently exists can spew out linguistically flat translations, lacking such things as an interpretive touch, or an implicit literary and cultural curiosity that breathes the fire of life and meaning into language as it is actually experienced by humans. That's a great and necessary criticism. But.
Hubert Dreyfus spent decades insisting that there were things "computers can't do", and that those things were represented by magical undefined terms that speak to ineffable human essence. He insisted, for instance, that computers performing chess at a high level would never happen because it required "insight", and he felt similarly about the kind of linguistic comprehension that has now, at least in part, been achieved by LLMs.
LLMs still fall short in critical ways, and losing sight of that would involve letting go of our ability to appreciate the best human work in (say) history, or linguistics. And there's a real risk that "good enough" AI can cause us to lose touch with such distinctions. But I don't think it follows that you have to draw a categorical line insisting such understanding is impossible, and in fact I would suggest that's a tragic misunderstanding that gets everything exactly backwards.
AI represents a move to the massive centralization of information into a few sources. History (or it's "interpreters") should never be in the hands of these few powerful entities aligned with even more powerful governments.
> There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do.
Yeah, no. I find it funny how everyone from other specialties take offence when their piece of "advanced" whatever gets put on a list, but they have absolutely no issue with making uninformed, inaccurate and oversimplified remarks like "averaging machines".
Brother, these averaging machines just scored gold at IMO. Allow me to doubt that whatever you do is more impressive than that.
the more we can all dump EVERYTHING we got into the same giant mega AI,
the better off we will all be.
but of course, this goes directly against how so many people think, that I won't even bo
> One, there is no way LLMs in their current state are capable of replacing human translators for a case like this. And two, they do make the job of translation a lot less tedious. I wouldn't call it pleasant exactly, but it was much easier than my previous translation experiences
On the other hand, one day they will replace human beings. And secondly, if something like transalation (or in general, any mental work) becomes too easy, then we also run the risk of incresing the amount of mediocre works. Fact is, if something is hard, we'll only spend time on it if it's really worthwhile.
Same thing happens with phone cameras. Yes, it makes some things more convenient, but it also has resulted in a mountain of mediocrity, which isn't free to store (requires energy and hence pollutes the environment).
> There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do.
This exactly why tech companies want to replace those jobs with LLMs.
The companies control the models, the models control the narrative, the narrative controls the world.
Whoever can get the most stories into the heads of the masses runs the world.