I am a Sociolinguistic Cultural Cyborg!
by Rico Paul Vallejos

I am often asked if, when wearing my writer or translator hat, I am concerned about AI taking over the 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. I enjoyed the human interaction of hiring, training, and managing Machine Translation teams (MT modules for French, German, and Spanish automated translation), but at the time 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. My use of AI is also 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 some of the thinking is done by a machine. 

Bottom line: I've always enjoyed copyediting, and now a lot of it involves editing copy written by AI.