Category: writing

I occasionally check various online forums that are part of what is known as the “online writing community”. These mostly exist on social media platforms like Reddit and Facebook. I do this as little as possible.

Over the past few years, I have noticed a great deal of outrage in these venues over the use of artificial intelligence, more commonly known as “AI”.

By now, anyone with a dog in this fight is aware of the arguments. On one side there is the case for the inevitability of technological advancements, and putting those advancements to use in the marketplace. On the other side, there is the argument against replacing living, breathing human beings with soulless software. There is also the fact that those living, breathing human beings require paychecks to purchase food, rent, and health insurance.

Writers are kind of in the middle of all this. There are a handful of online hacks teaching both weary and aspiring writers how to generate something approximating a novel with software prompts. This is an entirely separate issue and not one that I will cover in depth here.

But writing a novel with software is essentially writers trying to replace themselves with AI. Most writers already have fixed views on this one. Those who actually enjoy writing laugh at the very idea. Others are burned out or frustrated, and would love nothing more than to hand off their creative work to a software package.

That’s a fool’s trap; because the results of AI writing are about what you would expect. (Note: The people teaching these AI writing shortcuts don’t like the results, either. They are making money by teaching their “secrets” to others, not by selling the AI novels they’re creating. But I digress.)

No, where the real conflict—and often the moral dilemma—arises for writers is in the realm of adjacent services. Some of these adjacent services are not cheap, after all.

Four hundred dollars for a book cover from a freelance artist? Three to four grand for an audiobook from a narrator? This is real money, even from the perspective of people who have real businesses. Why not just rely on AI for these services and save all that cash?

This is the point where the debate predictably gets nasty, often with freelance illustrators and voice actors jumping into the fray. I’m not going to weigh the different arguments here, nor condemn anyone for taking a strong, emotionally charged position. People’s livelihoods and bottom lines are on the line on both sides of these issues.

I have noticed something new, though—and more than a little ironic. One of the low-cost AI services to hit the market recently is AI translation. It used to cost thousands of dollars to get a translation of a manuscript from English into Spanish, French, or German, let alone into Japanese or Mandarin. Software now takes care of this at minimal cost…after a fashion. Amazon, in fact, has recently rolled out a beta version of AI translation for writers.

In online writing forums, I have seen a few debates about the accuracy of AI literary translations. Some writers wonder aloud (with good reason) if a whiz-bang AI translation program is trustworthy for a 90K-word book. (Hint: it almost certainly isn’t.) But I have seen none of the usual hand-wringing about replacing human translators with software. Not a peep. The outrage over AI, it turns out, is highly selective. What about the “art” of literary translation? What about the literary translators’ paychecks?

I’ve seen this cycle repeat many times over the years. An issue provokes outrage among a certain group of people…until it doesn’t. In the early 1980s, folks on the progressive left used to inveigh against nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. But for a variety of reasons, nuclear weapons are no longer the fashionable concern that they once were. Folks with a progressive mindset now see the plastic bags at their local grocery store as a far more pressing issue than warheads that could wipe out the entire world in a few hours.

I used to work as a translator myself (Japanese/English). I did corporate work, not literary work. For a three-year stretch during the 1990s, I made a very comfortable income doing nothing else. (I was the in-house interpreter/translator at a Japanese automotive components manufacturer in Ohio.)

I haven’t worked as a translator for well over 20 years. But if I did, I would no doubt have some strong feelings about the tendency toward replacing human translators with machines.

Another irony: I saw that shift coming in translation even in the 1990s. Sometime around 1995, I began reading articles about Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu experimenting with machine translation. End-to-end, seamless machine translation has long been a goal in the corporate sector.

Therefore, I’m not surprised to see software-based translations in the age of AI. I am, though, somewhat surprised that literary translators aren’t more vocal about being replaced. They are certainly a reticent bunch…at least when compared to the hyper-vocal illustrators and voice actors.

-ET