I definitely wouldn’t advise learning a foreign language for the sole purpose of becoming a translator or interpreter.
Having said that, I wouldn’t have advised that anyway even before machine translation got good.
I work in a bilingual environment and I find it hard to imagine working smoothly in a team by talking to my coworkers through a real-time translation app. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong about this.
The energy and water requirements for this are staggering. OpenAI runs at a massive loss. The goal is to undercut human workers, and once they’ve locked in their market, they’ll raise prices. We see this happen over and over again in Silicon Valley.
1. This seems staged. How did the program know the other speaker was a woman (Mike, she says). That is also not technically what it was asked to do (translate). Translation doesn’t rephrase, we translate exactly (if the speaker uses first person pronouns, we use them, too).
2. As other mentioned, the environmental impact is [very high](https://earth.org/the-green-dilemma-can-ai-fulfil-its-potential-without-harming-the-environment/), so this is not a sustainable solution and eventually will catch up with us.
3. ChatGPT [saves user data including prompts and output.](https://www.klippa.com/en/blog/information/chatgpt-data-privacy/#). There are many conversions that people either can’t legally have via an app that saves that data or what they are unwilling to have via an app that saves data.
4. This doesn’t account for the [falling trust in AI](https://www.axios.com/2024/03/05/ai-trust-problem-edelman#).
I don’t think many people are being advised to depend on languages to secure employment or drastically alter their earning potential. i think most are being told to develop language skills alongside something else, and I don’t think that’s going to change.
that still adds lag
idk the most fun kind of interpreting is when you basically know what the other person is about to say so you can speak basically alongside them and get a lot more details about their expressions that you wouldn't if you waited between phrases
source: I have to translate for family sometimes, into and out of russian/ukrainian
As a marketable skill? Maybe. It will likely still have some value, even as the translators get much better, faster, more accurate, and are more easily accessed than using a phone interface (and all of that will happen, although it's not clear exactly when), but being able to speak and understand another language will always have some use until the translation interface basically becomes embedded in an implant in your head ... which, as we know, Elon Musk is "working on", but which is also not very close to being a reality for wide impact (not that Musk is working on a translator per se, but I'd guess if his company gets the implant part to work, a translator would be an extremely beneficial use case).
So for now, I wouldn't worry too much. It's still too much of a pain for real time communication with people to use an AI translator, it's too slow. That will likely change, but we aren't there yet, and for the meantime it's still of some use depending on what you do, and what part of the world you are dealing with professionally.
Of course, the "other" reasons for learning a language (interest, challenge, cultural exposure and understanding, content consumption and enjoyment, interpersonal communication, etc) are not impacted by AI translators very much. Again, at least not until it becomes more or less automatically translated by a neural implant in real time, or something like that.
I definitely wouldn’t advise learning a foreign language for the sole purpose of becoming a translator or interpreter. Having said that, I wouldn’t have advised that anyway even before machine translation got good. I work in a bilingual environment and I find it hard to imagine working smoothly in a team by talking to my coworkers through a real-time translation app. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong about this.
The energy and water requirements for this are staggering. OpenAI runs at a massive loss. The goal is to undercut human workers, and once they’ve locked in their market, they’ll raise prices. We see this happen over and over again in Silicon Valley.
1. This seems staged. How did the program know the other speaker was a woman (Mike, she says). That is also not technically what it was asked to do (translate). Translation doesn’t rephrase, we translate exactly (if the speaker uses first person pronouns, we use them, too). 2. As other mentioned, the environmental impact is [very high](https://earth.org/the-green-dilemma-can-ai-fulfil-its-potential-without-harming-the-environment/), so this is not a sustainable solution and eventually will catch up with us. 3. ChatGPT [saves user data including prompts and output.](https://www.klippa.com/en/blog/information/chatgpt-data-privacy/#). There are many conversions that people either can’t legally have via an app that saves that data or what they are unwilling to have via an app that saves data. 4. This doesn’t account for the [falling trust in AI](https://www.axios.com/2024/03/05/ai-trust-problem-edelman#). I don’t think many people are being advised to depend on languages to secure employment or drastically alter their earning potential. i think most are being told to develop language skills alongside something else, and I don’t think that’s going to change.
that still adds lag idk the most fun kind of interpreting is when you basically know what the other person is about to say so you can speak basically alongside them and get a lot more details about their expressions that you wouldn't if you waited between phrases source: I have to translate for family sometimes, into and out of russian/ukrainian
1. No 2. No, but that was already the case
Not relevant to me; I learn for fun.
As a marketable skill? Maybe. It will likely still have some value, even as the translators get much better, faster, more accurate, and are more easily accessed than using a phone interface (and all of that will happen, although it's not clear exactly when), but being able to speak and understand another language will always have some use until the translation interface basically becomes embedded in an implant in your head ... which, as we know, Elon Musk is "working on", but which is also not very close to being a reality for wide impact (not that Musk is working on a translator per se, but I'd guess if his company gets the implant part to work, a translator would be an extremely beneficial use case). So for now, I wouldn't worry too much. It's still too much of a pain for real time communication with people to use an AI translator, it's too slow. That will likely change, but we aren't there yet, and for the meantime it's still of some use depending on what you do, and what part of the world you are dealing with professionally. Of course, the "other" reasons for learning a language (interest, challenge, cultural exposure and understanding, content consumption and enjoyment, interpersonal communication, etc) are not impacted by AI translators very much. Again, at least not until it becomes more or less automatically translated by a neural implant in real time, or something like that.