Needless to say the SoA was like a lamb with two tails as it gleefully revelled in the Meta piracy site news.
On of the best AI stories this week is the news that Taylor and Francis is using AI to translate minor-language content into English.
The Luddite Fringe was instantly up in arms, with the Society of Luddites – oops, sorry, Authors, leading the charge, trotting out the pret-a-porter evidence-absent claim that one third of translators are losing work to AI.
Now the SOA can add all this translation from T&F to their list, conveniently ignoring the fact that these jobs never existed.
As T&F make clear, these minor language translations simply do not have an audience big enough to justify human costs. Rather, new work will be created because the AI translations will need human oversight.
The SoA claims AI presents an existential threat to life on Earth as we know it. No, sorry, an existential threat to creators. But then, anything new and shiny is an existential threat to the SoA. Spotify, anyone?
Needless to say the SoA was like a lamb with two tails as it gleefully revelled in the Meta piracy site news. “Yet more evidence of the catastrophic impact generative AI is having on our creative industries worldwide. As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rightsholders of all the works it has been exploiting.”
And to show how serious they are, the SoA is removing all its content from Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram.
Oops, no sorry, the SoA will continue to use Facebook and Instagram as if nothing has happened. Bogeyman existential threats may be hypothetically bad for creators, but they are good news for the self-righteous SoA.
BTW it was former SoA president Philip Pullman that first called the SoA self-righteous, not me! In 2022 Pullman called for the organisation to be “investigated from the outside.”
That didn’t happen, of course, and today the SoA continues to put self-serving opinion before the real interests of its members.
But as I explore in today’s TNPS op-ed, the existential threat lies elsewhere, and is very real.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.
