10/06/2025

How AI Is Changing White-collar Work

Ninety-five percent of AI pilots are failing to provide a return on investment

Julian Pintat, a freelance English-to-German translator has watched his 15-year career gradually unravel.

Specializing in high-stakes fields like medical technology and pharmaceutics, his expertise has been repriced as an AI cleanup service. On a recent job, translating an operating manual for an oil rig, AI mistranslated "scale"—a mineral buildup—as both a musical scale and a device for measuring weight. Fixing such basic flaws, which now constitutes 95 percent of his work, often takes longer than translating from scratch, he said—a frustrating reality that has halved his income and put life plans including marriage and starting a family on indefinite hold. With Google Translate and later DeepL having burst onto the scene years before ChatGPT—professional translators have been feeling the effects of artificial intelligence longer than most.

"I'm the canary in the coal mine," Pintat said.

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