If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?

0:00Hi, this is Mary Childs. There's the saying about artificial intelligence that right now, AI is the worst it will ever be. It screws up a lot now, but it is only going to get better. So how to even answer questions like will AI replace jobs or change jobs? We talked about this on the show last year and especially in the Planet Money newsletter, which our beloved Greg Rizalski writes. Subscribe if you haven't already. It's very good. So today we are sharing something that Greg uncovered for the newsletter this summer. He figured out a clever way to investigate AI progress for jobs. Look at something AI is already good at.

0:40Translation. Greg interviewed an AI innovator who also is the head of the language learning app Duolingo. We regularly publish Greg's newsletter chats as bonus episodes for our Planet Money Plus subscribers. So if that is you, you already got a chance to hear this. Bonus content is just one perk of signing up for Planet Money Plus. You also get every episode of Planet Money without sponsor messages. And you get exclusive Planet Money merch at the NPR shop. So while you listen today, consider supporting us by signing up. Just go to plus.npr.org. Okay, here's Greg. Recently, I've been trying to figure out how to measure if AI is overhyped right now, or maybe it's appropriately hyped.

1:23I don't know. And one of the people I talk to about this is an entrepreneur and AI innovator. My name is Luis Fonan, and I am the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo. Duolingo. It's the popular language learning app. Luis has a pretty fascinating background. He was born and raised in Guatemala, and he came to the United States for college to study mathematics and computer science. In his early 20s, Luis co-created CAPTCHA. You're probably familiar with it when a website forces you to prove you're human and ask you to do things like identify stoplights or bicycles or whatever in a grid of photographs.

2:00I didn't know this until I spoke to him, but CAPTCHA is actually an acronym. Completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. It's a mouthful. It's basically a test to distinguish whether you're a human or a computer. Luis's work on CAPTCHA is one reason why he was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant back in 2006. At the time, he was only 28. How do you stay humble after that? I don't know. I don't know if I am humble, but... Well, that's honest. You know, I don't know about staying humble, but I mean, there's a lot left to do. Back when he first co-created CAPTCHA, Luis says, the test was pretty simple.

2:40It was, you know, easier to trip up machines. At first, all it took was identifying squiggly letters and numbers. Nowadays, computers are about as good as humans at reading the story of the characters, which is why CAPTCHAs have moved onto basically really blurry images of bicycles or whatever. Interestingly, Luis says, these are images that are often taken by self-driving cars. The computer guiding these cars sometimes has a hard time deciphering what these images are, which is why CAPTCHA crowdsources help from humans. This data is, in other words, kind of slowly making AI smarter. So yeah, Luis is a pretty interesting guy to talk to about AI, not only because of his work on CAPTCHA, but also because earlier this year, there were a series of headlines suggesting that his company, Duolingo, laid off human workers and replaced them with AI.

3:31Okay, so here is today's bonus episode, my conversation with Luis Van On. I want to start with jobs in language translation. So I've seen a lot of these popular listicles in the media that highlight the 10 most likely jobs to be like killed by AI. And basically on all of these lists are the jobs of translators, interpreters. And yet the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that over the next decade, the number of American translators interpreters will actually grow by 4%, which is about equal to the average growth of all occupations. And I also took a look at job sites, and there are still tons of companies hiring translators interpreters right now.

4:09So what's up here? If AI is so good, why are translating jobs actually still growing? Well, so, okay, a couple of things. This is not new. Translation by computers between, for example, English and Spanish or English and German, like between the large languages has been really good, you know, starting with Google Translate for about 10 years. And it keeps getting better and better and better. And, you know, what I don't think is going to happen is one day suddenly, you know, translation was completely and then the next day is perfect and then all translators get fired. This is a gradual process which started out years and years ago.

4:45And today, a lot of translation is already done by computers. I mean, that's already happening. Now, at the same time, I think there's also more and more demand for translation. Because translation is a lot cheaper, a lot faster, because computers are there, there's a lot more demand. So what you're seeing today, at least for translation in particular, is this combo, this hybrid between humans and computers. I mean, maybe the computer takes the first pass and then a human kind of fixes it up a little bit, etc. And over time, it is probably the case that computers will be as good as humans at language translation, maybe even better because they're faster.

5:20We're not quite there yet. It's still the case that computers make some mistakes. And I think companies are hiring humans or governments are hiring humans. When you want somebody to actually have a real opinion because it may be a life or death situation, for example. I don't think you want to fully rely on a computer if you're a translator for the army or something like that. And you're talking to an enemy combatant. I don't think you want to fully do that yet. or companies who just want to make sure that no mistakes are made. But even translators that are hired, most of them use computer translation as a first step.

5:55And I think you're going to see something like that. So does Duolingo employ translators and interpreters? And if so, how many? Or about how many? Interpreters, we don't because we don't do like, you know, what you would see like on the UN, like, you know, doing real-time interpretation like that. But translators, we do not very many. um we have been reducing that number for a while and at this point it's it's a i don't know dozens it's not a lot um what do they do at your company generally they're they're going over the things that computers have done because most of the stuff we do with computers yeah double checking making sure now it depends on what for by the way i should say um there are certain you know there's a difference in importance in text for example if it's our content as in like our learning content there's so much of that thousands and thousands and thousands of kind of sentences and words and paragraphs that is mostly done by computers and we probably spot check it but if it's things like the user interface of duolingo where we say like you know the button says quit and we have to translate that is all done with humans and we spend a lot of effort on that but that's because each one of those is highly valuable like we cannot have a mistake in the quit button or in the button that says purchase now or whatever.

7:14We just cannot have a mistake. And not only, it's not just about mistakes. We want to make sure that the voice is consistent throughout the app, et cetera. So in other words, because AI can make mistakes, because it's not perfect, you need humans. It's worth the extra cost. Yeah. For example, in our app, we have made the decision that in Spanish, we use the informal second person pronoun. So when we'd refer to somebody in the app, we refer to the user informally when i say you we say the uninformal you it's like usted first to is informal usted is yeah we don't use usted we use to the people that do our user interface in spanish know that i know that very well if you were to just have a computer to do it it may you know it may be inconsistent in different screens it may be something so we just want to make sure that it's all consistent that it has the same voice then playful voice etc and so for that we still employ humans so earlier this year there were a number of articles, actually quite a few, including in the Washington Post.

8:13They were published and they made a really big deal out of the fact that Duolingo laid off, I guess, some contractors who specialized in translation and replaced them with AI. So first off, what can you tell us about that episode? Did you lay off translators and replace them with AI? Yeah, there's a lot of exaggeration that happened there. I mean, there was all these articles that said major layoffs. This is not true. We did not lay off. Like 10 % of your workforce or something? Yeah, no, this is just not true. We did not, first of all, no full-time employees were affected here. We've had a contractor force of a few hundred contractors.

8:49And what happened at the end of last year is we did not renew the contract for some of them because we looked at the work that was going to be required over time, and we just didn't need as many of them. It is true that one of the reasons we didn't need as many of them is because some of the stuff that they were doing, we could now automate. But these were, you know, you've got to understand this type of worker. I mean, these were not all of them, but a lot of them were people who were working a couple of hours a week from a very remote location. And, you know, that type of work is probably a lot more susceptible for being substituted with AI than somebody who is kind of in the office every day, you know, doing more creative stuff or anything like that.

9:29This was, you know, a lot of that was just kind of rote stuff. So I've got to ask, do you have any plans to lay off more contractors or employees and replace them with AI? And why or why not? No plans, no plans for that. What is true is that we're, you know, we're going to, as a company, and I think most tech companies, we're leaning into AI quite a bit. And we're going to continue doing that. And you know what we're seeing? I'll tell you, I'll give you a really good example of what we're seeing with AI. about five years ago somebody pitched a feature idea to me which was basically in the app some of the lessons you were basically going to see a little like animated kind of like a little two minute cartoon where you got to listen in the language that you were learning it was a really cool feature and then i asked how long is the data for this going to take to create because we need to make the data for like basically all the episodes they said five years and i said no you're crazy we're not going to make that feature i don't want to spend five years on this this is ridiculous about a year ago, that same person came back to me and basically said, hey, we can do that.

10:34But the data now takes like three months to make with AI. There's some human involvement, but it takes like three months to make with AI. And then I'm like, sure, just do it. And you know what's beautiful about it? It's not only can you do it in three months as opposed to five years, even if you mess up and you do it in three months, and at the end you don't love the outcome, you can redo it. And it'll only take three months. So you can do it and mess up and do it again. and still do it way faster than five years. That's the type of stuff that you're seeing where things just, by the way, we're still going to need the humans.

11:05We're just going to be able to do way more and way cheaper than things that we just couldn't do before. So supercharging productivity. Yeah, the productivity is like 10x. And that's more the direction we're going to go, where we're going to lean into AI quite a bit. But we're just going to be doing things that before were just prohibitive because they were going to require a thousand people working for years, Whereas now, 20 people working for a few months can do what was required before. So I think on our end, that's probably more what you're going to see.

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12:10When did Duolingo start using AI, and how have you been using it? Since the beginning. When we launched Duolingo, we knew that we wanted to have a computer that was going to teach you. So not, we didn't want to have humans teach you. We wanted to have compute, we bet on computers. So from the beginning, we were using AI. Now, of course, AI has gotten a completely different tone and definition in the last couple of years because of large language models. But AI has been around for, you know, the concept of AI has been around for whatever, 60 years, maybe longer than that. So when did you adopt large language models?

12:44Well, large language models, almost two years ago, less than, a little less than two years ago, we started playing with GPT-4. We got early access to it. And so we started playing with it. We officially launched the first features related to it last year. Is this an official partnership with OpenAI? We have an official partnership with OpenAI. It allows you to chat in real time on the app? Yeah, conversation. That's the biggest thing. Learning a language requires a number of different aspects. You've got to learn vocabulary. You've got to learn how to read. You've got to learn a bunch of stuff.

13:14We historically have been really good at teaching you all aspects of language except for one, which is conversation. and in particular the kind of multi-turn you know think on your feet kind of conversation we just couldn't do that with technology up until large language models but now we can and so that's what we're doing where we're basically really adding a lot of features to teach you how to converse a lot better so a couple weeks ago when open ai recently released gpt 4.0 they they really highlighted to the world like how great it is at translation it was really kind of front row and center of how they were selling this new version of it.

13:51And, you know, they showed a smartphone using GPT-4O, translating a conversation between people in real time. Are you concerned at all that it will reduce the demand for Duolingo? The fact that like these are getting so good. We are not seeing a decline in people wanting to learn a language with Duolingo, even though this has been true. If you look at our users, we have two big chunks of users. One is actually Americans or British people who are doing so as a hobby. It's just a hobby. And when you ask them, like, why are you learning on Duolingo? They're like, well, you know, I used to play Candy Crush.

14:25And now at least I'm getting pretty good at Spanish. Those people are going to continue doing so because it's a hobby again. I mean, you know, people are doing chess as a hobby, even though computers have been better than humans at chess for the last 20 years. So that's kind of one big group of people. And the other big group of people is people learning English for a number of reasons. Not only is it for, you know, possible education opportunities or employment opportunities, but it's even, it's just even to get around. I mean, if you go to many other countries, this is true in many Latin American countries, a lot of stuff is just in English.

14:55And like ads are in English and stuff like that. And people just want to say, well, you know. Yeah, music. So English is a unique language in that respect. Because it is the lingua franca, et cetera. People actually, honest to God, want to learn English. And that's the other big chunk of our users. So, you know, historically, we just have not been concerned about this. So last question, do you have worries about AI? Are you optimistic? Like, how would you characterize your feelings, your belief about AI? I'm mostly optimistic. I'm mostly optimistic, but I am anxious. And I think the anxiety comes from the fact that it's just really hard to know what will happen and how fast it will happen.

15:35and and in addition to that i can see a place where maybe the end thing will be really good like you know imagine we have ai can do everything etc whatever you want and the end thing is well we just you know we just have a life of leisure maybe that's the end thing it's great i worry that the transition may not be so good especially if it's very fast because it may be the case that a lot of people could lose their job etc i just don't know my sense is that what we probably want is probably a slower transition rather than a faster transition. And it seems to be happening that way with translators, interpreters.

16:09You said this has been one of the frontiers of AI research and development. And it's taken a long time. The good news is that even with things that are clearly obvious, societies take a while to change. Even with things that are like, we just all agree that this is the right thing to do. It just takes years. And so I think in general, if you give humanity a couple of decades, of notice, I think we'll probably figure it out. But I do worry about a short transition because, you know, if a lot of people lose their job at the same time, particularly, you know, this is kind of this, there's all this research, you know, large groups of unemployed young males leads to basically war.

16:51You kind of don't want that. You know, as long as that doesn't happen, I think we'll be OK. All right. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you, Greg. Thank you.

17:05If you liked this, you can hear more of Greg's newsletter interviews and other bonus episodes like the Planet Money Movie Club by signing up for Planet Money Plus. In these times of uncertain advertising revenue, subscriptions are the steadiest, best way to support our work and help keep us going. Again, just go to plus.npr.org for details. We are very grateful. I'm Mary Childs. This is NPR. Thank you.