The executives behind big generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies are quick to claim their products will displace huge numbers of workers. In this environment, it’s easy to see research about AI-vulnerable jobs and start to panic. But dig a little deeper and there’s less need for translators, interpreters, historians, and others to worry about whether AI will replace them—unless human employers, enraptured by AI’s hype, decide so.
“I think it is useful for people to focus on the tasks as opposed to jobs,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. “There may not be that many whole jobs that get eliminated. There certainly are going to be a lot of tasks that are going to be eliminated.”
This exact point was made by Microsoft researchers when they issued a report in July with a list of jobs with tasks that most and least overlapped with tasks that could be done by generative AI.
“It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated and thus experience job or wage loss… This would be a mistake, as our data do not include the downstream business impacts of new technology, which are very hard to predict and often counterintuitive,” the authors of the study wrote.
It’s also important to keep in mind that jobs like translation, interpreting, and research involve more than just the tasks with which AI may be able to assist.
Andy Benzo, a legal translator and president-elect of the American Translators Association, says translators do more than just transcribe and convert documents. Medical translators and interpreters, for example, help people communicate with doctors and nurses to ensure they’re getting proper care. These are literal life-and-death situations. Likewise, financial transactions that move from one language to another need to be clear, or else someone’s money or livelihood may be at stake.
Professional translators and interpreters are generally experts not only in language, but in their specific field, Benzo said. “You pay us for what we know. We say that what we do is accurate.”
Translation tools powered by generative AI are getting increasingly skilled at helping someone communicate in a language they don’t understand. But professional translators and interpreters specialize in getting things exactly right. You don’t want a translation that makes a good guess—which is really all you get from AI—when your money or your life is on the line. You want a translation that understands the nuances that vary between the languages. And you want someone who’ll be accountable if it’s wrong.
“If AI makes a mistake, who’s going to be responsible for that?” Benzo asked.
Language is also not static. While the AI industry is fast-moving, language changes even more quickly. Every day, someone somewhere finds a new way to phrase an idea. The Cambridge Dictionary, for example, just added words like “skibidi” and “broligarchy,” which an AI with an outdated training dataset may not be able to understand. But a human, properly trained, can keep up with those subtle adaptations.
“Language evolves all the time,” Benzo said. “Language belongs to the people. Nobody is the boss of language. The only one who can perceive the nuances of a language is a human.”
Nobody knows what AI’s effect will be on the economy even a few years from now. The capabilities of these tools, and our understanding of what they can and can’t do, is constantly changing. But the technology’s effect on jobs won’t necessarily happen because of what it can do. It’ll happen because of what business leaders and executives think it can do.
“Corporate leaders may end up laying off too many people because of their optimism about AI, and they may end up discovering that there’s an important element that’s missing,” West said. “The human judgment aspect is going to be critical.”
CNET (9/1/25) By Jon Reed