During the industrial revolution, small-scale artisan weavers saw their way of life come under threat as mechanisation disrupted an entire way of life. Many lost their livelihoods, while others were forced into gruelling factory work to make ends meet or simply left the profession altogether. But there was still enough space in the market for a number of niche, quality-focused producers to survive. And thrive.
Now, with the advent of AI, language service providers are in the midst of a similarly seismic shift. Lots of people have seen their livelihoods wither away, buried their heads in the sand or left the profession altogether. But some are surviving. And thriving.
And it’s not just the giants, either. Why is that? The ability to adapt? Retooling? We could learn a lot from the weavers that owned their craft, and carried on producing items that the new power looms simply couldn’t manage. With their specialist skills further enhanced by a proliferation of new technologies, they found themselves in a position to meet shifting needs. Even in the most disrupted of markets, demand for genuinely high-quality content will always be there.
It’s only been a few years since the first mass-market large language models hit our screens, but humans are already starting to yearn for texts that have been tried, tested and validated by human experts like us who have been in the game for years. With consumer fatigue setting in, there’s increasing pushback against the beige conformity of AI. Content homogenization and bias are real issues*.
The elusive 20%
A colleague of mine here in Vienna talks about AI “Mittelmaß” – a kind of mediocrity that, while spelling the end for the truly terrible stuff, also comes at the cost of truly outstanding ideas and voices. Clearly, raising the floor is a good thing, but the ceiling is coming down too – as argued by researchers at MIT**.
So if you are a business going down the AI route, how do you stand out? What help is out there, ready and waiting to set you apart? As AI reverts to the mean, finding someone who knows how to preserve the unique tonality that defines the voice and soul of an organisation is proving more and more difficult.
At this point, the obvious thing for a company like ours to say is come to us, so say it I will: come to us. If it needs doing properly, go to Fox Coffey. Or, as we like to say in German, “wenn’s wirklich gut sein muss, geht’s zum Fox”.
Ultimately, AI is pretty amazing and we see that it can do a lot of the legwork. But that’s only one part of the job. What about the bits that really make the difference, that elusive missing 20%? Even with all that new tech, companies prefer to come to us, safe in the knowledge that we always come up with the goods. With more and more people now skipping the German version altogether and producing their content in English, having a partner on hand who can pull all the threads together is everything.
Like the survivors of the first industrial revolution, we’re there with that – figurative and literal – quality seal that gives buyers the peace of mind and the warm glow of satisfaction that they can trust us to deliver something that is hard to find. The genuine article.
++ As always, not written using AI ++
*https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/ai-from-ai-a-future-of-generic-and-biased-online-content/
**https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
