Good translation work is difficult and can take a long time. In the past, it was either done as part of academic research or if a publishing company was willing to invest that much. At least as far as works of fiction, history, plays, and anything else with nuance and cultural context go.

Now, machine translation is OK for straightforward factual works and can convey the gist of a story, but still do not measure up to a studied, thoughtful translation. I disagree that a bad translation is better than no translation, since a bad one will give the wrong impression of a text or kill its magic or imply things about the culture it came from that aren't accurate.

AI slop translations threaten to make what's left of the cultural differences in this world bland, bias them based on the mostly English language works that AI is t trained on, and who knows what else. AI doesn't understand meaning, it just provides a plausible answer to the input prompt. What would it do with Ulysses or The Bible if translations of them didn't exist?