Lost in automation?Vaselena/Getty Images

Earlier this year, a drumbeat of news headlines played into public anxieties about the safety of human jobs when Duolingo, a language learning app, became a prominent example of a company cutting workers and replacing them with artificial intelligence.

The most eye-catching job cuts were those for translators, who worked on some of the company’s less popular language education courses. Translators and interpreters are often near the top of media listicles as the jobs most likely to be killed by AI. When the stories about Duolingo’s job cuts circulated, they seemed to confirm that the inevitable AI jobs apocalypse had arrived.

In a recent conversation with Planet Money, the CEO of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, downplayed the meaning of the cuts. It wasn’t full-time employees. It was only 10% of their contractors. His company’s recent embrace of generative AI only played one part in the decision, and so on. More interesting, considering Duolingo’s official partnership with OpenAI, was von Ahn’s reaction to the company’s recent demonstration of its newest version of ChatGPT, GPT-4o.

Source: https://www.npr.org/

Full article: https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2024/06/18/g-s1-4461/if-ai-is-so-good-why-are-there-still-so-many-jobs-for-translators