ADAPT Academic Dr Joss Moorkens (Dublin City University) recently gave a talk for the Association of European Science and Technology Transfer Professionals (ASTP) as part of their Tea with ASTP series on October 3rd on ‘The value of human knowledge in the era of AI: Lessons from translation’.
The wave of hype since the launch of ChatGPT continues, with predictions that Generative AI will lead to widespread job displacement, educators struggling to change their assessment policies, and companies scrambling to get an AI product to market. For translators, this pattern will be familiar from the appearance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) 7 years ago.
This talk compares both scenarios, reflecting on the effect of NMT on the translation job market and ethical issues related to both NMT and Generative AI. In response to NMT, translation academics highlighted the need for NMT literacy. Similarly, AI literacy could help us to understand appropriate and inappropriate uses of Generative AI, and to assert the value of human knowledge in the era of AI.
