Work volume, spring 2023

I came here to ask this exact question and it's amazing to see another person here.
Well, I've worked for AJE for some years too, and this is the worst time since the pandemic.  It's very bad.

Here are some potential reasons why, and my conclusions.

1. The automated tools/ChatGPT, long under development, have sufficiently improved to reduce the workload, or this is at least under study/trial.  Personally, when I talk to ChatGPT it's not as good as people think.  But AI could take a substantial chunk of papers from the queue, at least as long as it remains in vogue.
2. They mentioned working on a new assignment format with .zip files.  Maybe they are focused on working out the kinks with that.
3. It could be the case that international authors use ChatGPT or trusted friends for these services now.  I have always considered this possibility, and maybe it finally is coming to fruition.  Language barriers can be broken in the long term and that was in fact a goal of AJE.

To be honest, this period has reduced my income but I turned my attention to other pursuits and am making progress on things I put off for the years I worked for AJE.  I would like to re-establish an equilibrium with more contract work and trying new things and taking more time for myself.  But for now, I embrace the newfound freedom and will devote all of my time and effort to my own future career and happiness.  I would encourage anyone else to do the same.  YOLO.  Good luck and I hope more people will reply. 

I came here with the same question, although it is a couple months since the last post. Has anyone completely stopped receiving assignments in the past two weeks? I’ve been an editor for AJE for many years and I am upset that there has been no communication from them about our income completely disappearing.

Oh yikes, I stopped taking assignments a few months ago for family reasons, so I don't know about the pay issue, sorry to hear about that. Now I rarely even see any available ones-when I do see them, they are always taken before I can claim them. You all probably received the recent message from contact@aje about how 'generative AI' is being used a lot. My husband is a researcher who is subscribed to AJE customer emails, and he's received their advertising about their own internal AI-aided editing service, now called Curie (https://www.aje.com/curie/), which you might already know about if you look at the regular AJE vendor site at all. I also didn't realize until I saw the campaign email for Curie that AJE has been bought out by Springer (or SpringerNature, I guess we're all going to eventually have one single boss eventually, heh). So I guess the business model has changed, and the generative AI...is actually AJE, at least some of the time. I expected it eventually but it would've been nice to be warned by the company to some extent.

I suspected that when we all started having to correct the work of AJE's 'automated tool' that our work was being used to train a larger program to take over for us, but I didn't know how long it would take or what to expect from it. In retrospect, we probably should've organized and tried to demand that the work we provided to train the AI be connected to some kind of long-term royalty scheme so we could all benefit, even if just a little, long-term. Probably it wouldn't have gone anywhere but at least trying would've made things better for other people by making an effort.

Any thoughts about this? A lot of workers, not just AJE contractors, are going to be affected by this type of tool and it would be good if those of us who've seen what happens can lend them a hand.