From Gutenberg to AI - The evolution of content creation

Before we moved from Brussels to Bern, I parked my dictionaries in the cellar. I didn’t dare to throw them away – although I know that most of the words and expressions they contain can be found and translated online today, even those from the thickest and most specialised of these dictionaries. I did not dare to throw them away - because they are part of my story.

Dictionaries have been my companions from my studies to my first years as a freelance translator, before online databases became better and better, before translation memory systems learned from us, before Google learned to provide better translations with each online text we published. Before Deepl provided even better results – and before AI started to be used to create websites and content (and yes, I also looked into what AI could say about my topic – from Gutenberg to AI – and I was relieved to see that we are not quite there to be replaced).

Obviously, the text above is semantically and logically 100% correct. It is powerful (“nothing short of revolutionary”), but these are not my words, this is not my story. What are the stories we share, what are the engaging narratives? They are engaging because they speak to us, because they tell a story we can relate to, because they are human. In the text above, I see nothing human. I see a “vast landscape”, I read about “mechanisms” and “gears of innovation”, but who is the narrator of this?

Just as the internet and its online databases eased our ways of working, there is no doubt AI can help us. It is indeed a powerful mechanism which is getting better and better, but it needs someone to control it. A driver who knows the direction in which to go, a conductor who knows how to orchestrate the text so that the final result is coherent – someone who can write the instructions (pardon: prompts) for AI to provide a good text, and someone who can sense-check this text and see if it is suitable for the target audience it is supposed to reach. This someone is – and I believe will be for quite some time - a human.

I was always fascinated and at the same time scared by the song “In the year 2525”. “Your legs got nothing to do /Some machine doin' that for you” it says for 5555…

As we are approaching 2025, we seem to be 3 530 years in advance to this scenario where parts of our limbs are becoming useless. Our legs - true, we office people, car drivers, lift users don’t use our legs as much as we could do.

And now with AI, do we use our brain? We should. No AI can replace a personal dialogue, see the full story behind, with all the facets and possible directions. Of course, AI can propose a text, but it is up to the human to interpret this text, give it a meaning, and where necessary modify it so that it really meets the needs.