I haven’t updated for a while. And updates have been less frequent recently. I wanted to write a short post explaining the reason for my silence. Without going into too much detail, because I currently don’t feel like it. The reason is very simple: life has become tougher for me. Financially. Unfortunately, I lost about 70% of my income due to AI.
I work as a translator and proofreader. And as AI developed and found its way into the hands of everyone and their grandmother, more and more people and businesses started using AI to translate their materials. Physical books, e-Books, online learning materials, product labels, general business content, product descriptions (for landing pages, Amazon etc.), blog articles and much, much more.
As of the beginning of this year, I “officially” lost my biggest client. I say “officially” because me getting phased out was a process of several months. Suddenly, instead of giving me work to translate, they gave me work to proofread (proofreading rates are cheaper) and their message was clear: “We don’t require high literacy, if people can understand it, it’s good enough”. And so, once they found the ”right balance” of AI translation with good enough results, communication eventually stopped after half a decade of working together.
This experience and many similar ones, have left a bitter taste in my mouth. I have learned: AI itself is not a problem. AI is a problem because people do not require more. They do not see the value in human skill, effort, talent, soul. This doesn’t just go for translation, this also goes for things like article writing, music, voice-overs, and of course, art.
As such, after all these years, I need to find a new way to make money.
It is still my dream to turn inspiremari.nl into a useful, interesting but also personal platform. But so far it’s been impossible to make any sort of income with it to support my hobby and efforts. I have spent countless – I’m serious: COUNTLESS – of hours on my website. Upgrading, tweaking, perfecting, editing, fixing problems, reviewing older pages, writing thousands of words of content, uploading hundreds of posts that are not only “cute to look at” but also useful for the community, such as the Blender Notes and Resources. I even like to make small games occasionally.
And there’s a lot more I want to do. But I’m just managing this all by myself and with what little I can now spend.
It’s become harder than ever to be found online. Just having a presence isn’t enough. I fondly remember the days where I had my sitebuilder-made website. People looked down on websites made with a sitebuilder, but apparently they couldn’t tell that my website was made with one. I would apply to become affiliates with similar websites (I really miss that!) and tell them my site was made with a sitebuilder and some of them told me they were surprised to hear that! Heh… well, eventually I learned HTML, which was necessary at the time in order to move over to paid hosting (content management platforms weren’t so common/easy to use back then).
But yeah. Now the internet is bigger than ever. There’s more people online than ever, but it’s also harder to reach them than ever. I have to fight hard to be seen. I have spent hundreds of hours learning how to draw in various styles. I spent thousands of hours drawing and making art. I learned search engine best practices, I managed multiple social media accounts, I left comments, likes, favorites, shared content, reached out directly, but in 15 years time, it has resulted in next to no activity across all my channels and platforms.
I love my website, I love working on it. I love the few people that do visit my website and interact with me and my content. Trust me, I am very grateful for that. But yes, it does occasionally depress me that it’s so hard to build a little community around my site to share my stuff, my content, my art and my life with.
Especially now that life has become tougher.
This is not the end!
It’s not the end of inspiremari.nl though! I haven’t given up in over 15 years time and I won’t give up for another 15 years. :D I still have many things to post, and many ideas I’m working on. Things will just slow down a bit until the situation improves.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for your support. <3
