By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-05-12 16:31:00
In response to your article (“Being Human Helps”: Is There Still Hope for Europe’s Translators Despite the Rise of AI?, May 8), I freelance for a company that produces memoirs for its clients. I conducted interviews and then wrote. Now I have an interview, a large language model is writing, and I get half of my previous fee for editing the result.
Editing the AI-generated text takes the same amount of time as it did to write the memoir. There are several reasons for this.
First, AI content is lengthy and homogeneous. I could I ignore this issue, but I relate to the often vulnerable people I interview. Secondly (and yes, I know that AI is constantly improving in this regard) it produces nonsense when a respondent is not coherent. Third, my employer requires me to “check for accuracy,” which the company presents as a quick additional task, but which is actually impossible without a full comparison of the interviews to the draft.
It’s a cynical and sophisticated way…
