I am a Sociolinguistic Cultural Cyborg!
by Rico Paul Vallejos

I am often asked if, as a writer and translator, I am concerned about AI taking over my profession. Here's my response.

My fascination with languages ignited in my teens, starting with French, Hebrew, and Greek, then with Portuguese, English, and a little Finnish as a young adult.

At 25, I embarked on a career in language and language technology. While I enjoyed the human interaction of hiring and training Machine Translation (MT) teams, the output of MT left much to be desired.

Fast-forward to today's powerful AI tools. As a wordsmith, I'm captivated by the ever-evolving human-machine collaboration, particularly the remarkable advancements in deep learning NLP/NLG.

When I use AI, I rely on specialized linguistic tools, an R&D crawler, and semantic analysis algorithms, rather than GPT. My use of AI is tailored to client contracts – some restrict it,  others offer more flexibility.

I love this dance with technology. It goes beyond boosting productivity: It inspires new ways of thinking, even when the thinker is a machine.