nastya > Status Update

Not worried about it, just sad.

maybe translation is a different beast? I can see how with the help of llm maybe the works in different languages can finally be readily available to more people? I don’t know much about the art of translation, I just remember seeing one little part from penguin’s ahmatova collection and there was a mistake in translation, like it changed the meaning of the line and somehow was printed in penguin classics!. but with fiction i am just too suspicious. maybe for some it won’t matter? there are definitely some works in genre fiction where it be very formulaic, I think most won’t see a difference.

Elaborate? I'm outta the loop on this, or perhaps I'm not understanding your question.

Marquise wrote: "Elaborate? I'm outta the loop on this, or perhaps I'm not understanding your question."

It's about how many writers today are heavily relying on LLMs for their work. You read a lot of fairy tale retellings, of varying quality, and I can’t believe you haven’t once wondered if one of them was written by a language model.

I recently saw the photos of a printed book on ukrainian twitter and the lazy publisher didn't even bothered to delete the instructions to the chatgpt from the finished text!

I don't know for a fact if emily wilde's encyclopaedia of faeries was "developed" by LLMs, but when I was reading it, I had a feeling that it was. But the better they become the harder they would be to spot

nastya wrote: "maybe translation is a different beast? I can see how with the help of llm maybe the works in different languages can finally be readily available to more people? I don’t know much about the art of..."

With poetry i might be more forgiving, you know if the translator wanted to create a sense of music in the line or have a rhyme or some other poetry thing. But then i feel the proper and descent thing to do with poetry is to have a bilingual edition with a literal translation as a footnote.

Yeah you are right, maybe it will allow for more access between languages - its not unusual now for translations to go through several languages like an estonian novel might be translated into german and that german translation translated into spanish or english and so on. But still i feel sad about it, just being romantic and old-fashioned i guess.

But I don't mean like a weird choice of word, it's more like the translator didn't understand the meaning of the sentence (it was not a very straightforward one). Damn, I cannot remember the example, it was discovered by a goodreads friend and we discussed it there, and he nuked his account a while ago. Anyway if someone who knows both languages carefully read it, they would've picked up on it.

And omg yes, it's a quite a point of contention in Ukraine, as you can imagine, cause it's much easier to translate a book from Chinese through russian, and cheapos do it. I often see suspicious Ukrainians sniffing out russian turns of phrases or some idioms copied into Ukrainian.

nastya wrote: "But I don't mean like a weird choice of word, it's more like the translator didn't understand the meaning of the sentence (it was not a very straightforward one). Damn, I cannot remember the exampl..."

Ok, then for you LLMS is really more of an opportunity than a worry, it allows for more direction translations into Ukrainian (&many other languages in the world and vise versa), and since professional translators working for large well resourced publishers csn already make a mess of a translation changing the meaning of the work through word choice, you have nothing to lose as at worse the computer model will be as bad as the human version!
So win- win?

and what about translators who won’t have a job anymore?

nastya wrote: "and what about translators who won’t have a job anymore?"

I think that is called " progress".

I recently read a book where this situation was one of the plot points.

I have no doubt it’s happening already, probably in the self-published world more for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if rehashing formulas by LLMs will eventually be the future.and I do t like the idea of that future. It sounds lazy and boring and frankly, depressing.

Nataliya wrote: "I recently read a book where this situation was one of the plot points.

I have no doubt it’s happening already, probably in the self-published world more for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if r..."

It's how george orwell daid fiction would be wrotten in "1984"

I am now kinda waiting for a huge prank: a very pretentious overwritten navel-gazing autofiction-- about 200 pages long-- to win every major literary award (cause only those can be deemed as literature these day, god forbid you have a story, a beginning and an end, a character), to get gushing reviews from all the snobby critics and then the author would reveal it was written by a machine!!!

nastya wrote: "I am now kinda waiting for a huge prank: a very pretentious overwritten navel-gazing autofiction-- about 200 pages long-- to win every major literary award (cause only those can be deemed as litera..."

Aaaaaand that’s exactly was the plot point in a book I was referring to earlier 😆

😩 so unoriginal, LM can do better...

I'm not worried at all, at least not yet. Anything I've read more than two sentences long written by AI sounds like absolute crap.