When ChatGPT was released last fall, a lot of white-collar workers had a chilling thought: “Could this technology do my job?” A May survey by CNBC and SurveyMonkey found that almost a quarter of workers fear losing their jobs to AI in the next few years, including 51% of workers in advertising and marketing and 46% of those in business support and logistics.
But for one white-collar profession — translators — this stopped being a theoretical question years ago. ChatGPT is based on a neural network architecture called the transformer that was first used by Google for machine translation in 2017. So competition from AI has been an everyday reality for human translators for more than five years.
Marc Eybert-Guillon started his career as a translator in 2017. In 2020, he founded From the Void, a firm that helps video game makers localize their games for foreign markets.