UK Society of Authors survey: a third of translators losing work to generative AI

The UK’s Society of Authors published survey results indicating that generative AI was already displacing paid work in the creative professions it represents. Of 787 members surveyed — a group spanning fiction and nonfiction writers, scriptwriters, poets, journalists, illustrators and translators — 36% of translators and 26% of illustrators said they had already lost work to generative AI.

The survey also found generative AI use was uneven across those same professions: 37% of translators reported having incorporated it into their own work, against just 12% of illustrators. Expectations for the future were bleaker than the reported losses so far — almost three-quarters of both translator and illustrator respondents believed AI would further damage their income, alongside nearly two-thirds of fiction writers and over half of nonfiction writers.

Nicola Solomon, then the Society’s chief executive and chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance, framed the shift as having happened fast: “Two years ago, these were niche systems but they have quickly become global, mass-market products.” She argued generative AI “must remain a tool to support and enhance human-made creative work, not a cheap alternative to replace it.”

The survey was among the earliest attempts to put a number on generative AI’s effect on creative livelihoods rather than describe it anecdotally, and translators and illustrators — piecework professions with output that AI tools directly approximate — showed the clearest measured impact. It fed into a wider argument, running in parallel with copyright litigation against AI developers, over whether the technology’s gains to users came at a direct and quantifiable cost to the people whose work trained it.