First AI Rejection Today - Machine Translation

[Bramblethorn]

I understand there probably aren't too many users publishing translations of their stories, which might explain why it hasn't been dealt with before. It really does need to be addressed, because the notion that machine translations of original human-written stories should count as "AI-generated" is absurd. It would be like saying that a human translator of a story should be credited as the "original" author of the story instead of for translating someone else's work, entitling them to the copyright and the royalties.

Translators do get copyright in their translations. If I were to publish a copy of Seamus Heaney's or Maria Dahvana Headley's new translations of "Beowulf" without authorisation, I could expect to hear from their lawyers.

Where the original is still under copyright, a translation is considered a derivative work, which essentially means that the original author and the translator both have rights to it and any publication/copying needs to be authorised by both of them.

Very often the translator is working in a "work for hire" arrangement, in which their contract will state that they sign over their rights to the translation in exchange for their payment. But unless that happens, the original author cannot legally publish that particular translation.

Given that the translator is effectively considered a second author for legal purposes, it makes sense that a site that forbids AI-written stories would also forbid AI-translated stories.

https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2022/10/copyright-in-translation-gregory-rabassa/

 

[Britva415]

Already done, fingers crossed.

I grant, knowing a policy or clarity around this “special case” would be worthwhile, but I kind of feel like the outcome of that should have been obtained first, before all the outrage.

 

[ronde]

I agree with you that the quality of the translation often leaves something to be desired, but the issue isn't the quality of the translation; the issue is the story being rejected on the grounds that it's "AI generated". I've published twenty other machine translations here on Literotica, and that didn't stop Laurel and whatever filtering software she uses from approving each of them. Either, this is the first time the software has noticed (which it shouldn't, because the original English version was written by me unaided), or this is the false positive. Either way, there's nothing in Literotica's AI policy about machine translations, which rely on AI but don't generate any original content.

I stand corrected and would offer this suggestion.

I've had a couple stories rejected for political content, though neither story advocated for any ideology or political position. I've since gotten a couple similar stories published with no problems by adding a "note to admin" explaining that while politics are a background for the story, they are only that. Try adding a "note to admin" telling Laurel that the story is a machine translation of a story you authored and include a link to that story.

 

[XerXesXu]

Transformer architectures, created to translate from one language to another, are the basis of LLM's. In most Copyright jurisdictions the user of the program is the copyright holder; in the USA the Copyright Office is 'confused'. There, the program cannot hold the copyright, nor can the user, because the user does not pass the creative act test.

In translating from one language to another, the programs have the same problems as translating from English to English, which is what they're most commonly used for. Check out some of the snippet threads and you'll see how one concatenation of words can be misinterpreted by both native English speakers and LLMs, if shorn of sufficient context.

This may go some way to explaining the uncertainty and inconsistency which a site like Lit, which is a non-AI site, shares with the rest of the world.

 

[Kasumi_Lee]

Thanks for taking the time to give your thoughts on this.

I suspect that Lit has always known you were submitting machine-generated translations, and that this rejection of one instance is a slap on the wrist to get your attention. I see your catalog has some stories with French AND German translated repostings. I don’t remember what the context was, but I do remember Laurel telling me once that the site doesn't want to host redundant content.** Machine generated translations are toe-ing that line.

So Lit has always had a problem with my machine-generated translations but only now decided to make it known to me? That's practically the definition of arbitrary enforcement, especially since the AI policy has nothing to say about translated works either way. As for redundant content, judging by who has commented on my English, French, and German stories, I don't see any overlap between the different readerships, so I don't think fears of redundant content apply here. At least, they shouldn't.

I can also tell you that what you're doing violates the TOS for the Kindle store. Machine translations of content will get your account sent to the shadow realm. I appreciate that Lit is a different site with its own rules, but I think it's worth noting when a significant player in the field takes a stance like that (and for context that rule has been in place since at least 2020) At any given moment, Lit can simply decide that "If a rule is good enough for Amazon, it's good enough for us."

I can tell you for a fact that's NOT against Kindle's TOS. All you have to do is declare honestly on the Kindle eBook Content page whether AI was used to generate the cover, the content, or the translation, and specify how much manual editing you performed on the AI-generated content. Amazon knows I've submitted machine translations of my English works for sale because I've selected the option declaring it upfront.

EDIT:** In other words, if the content of your German language submission is what a user would get if they simply ran your existing story through Google Translate, then the site would prefer readers do that themselves and only host your original work in the language you originally wrote it.

That would seem to defeat the point of having different language versions of the site. Why bother allowing non-English speakers to browse the site in their own language when we can force them to use Google Translate or some other program to search for an English story they might like and then read it?

EDIT2: I did not make my second point clearly. Perhaps this is not a case of "oh here's this blameless thing why do they suddenly have a problem with it?", but rather "This was always a problem, but they let it go since you are a consistent (authentic) author. Now it seems like it's becoming a pattern and they're not okay with that."

Clarity, or lack thereof, is still my main problem with this. If Lit is fine with machine translations by an author within certain limits, they should say so. If they're not fine with machine translations creating "redundant" content, they should also say so.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I wrote up a long response, but ended up deleting it because it doesn't seem like you want direction. It seems like you want sympathy because you think your version of breaking the rules is "different."

Your non-English content definitively violates the guidelines, but the guidelines also state that Lit's policy on AI is evolving. Good luck getting on the right side of that.

 

[Reenigam]

Words like "genie" and "bottle" come to mind.

Welcome to a world where nothing is believable, a world where the victory of gushing nerddom is complete.

 

[Kasumi_Lee]

I wrote up a long response, but ended up deleting it because it doesn't seem like you want direction. It seems like you want sympathy because you think your version of breaking the rules is "different."

Your non-English content definitively violates the guidelines, but the guidelines also state that Lit's policy on AI is evolving. Good luck getting on the right side of that.

With all due respect, twenty approved submissions followed by a rejection IS different. Suddenly, the filtering software has noticed that the translation was produced by a computer program. That's a successful detection rate of 4.67%, which makes a joke out of any policy on the topic, however well intentioned.

 

[AwkwardMD]

From: https://www.literotica.com/faq/publishing/publishing-ai

One area of particular concern is software or apps that “rewrite” your paragraphs or stories for you. The text that results from rewriting features is definitely AI generated. These type of apps are replacing original human written text with generic AI generated text, and should be avoided when submitting work to Literotica. Readers prefer to experience your worlds and your fantasies in your own unique voice, rather than having them smoothed into a generic artificial voice available to everyone else using the same software.

(Bolded section by me, for emphasis) This is what you did. It violates the guidelines. That you got away with it is not the win you think it is.

 

[Kasumi_Lee]

From: https://www.literotica.com/faq/publishing/publishing-ai

(Bolded section by me, for emphasis) This is what you did. It violates the guidelines. That you got away with it is not the win you think it is.

This refers to writing aid programs that alter the tone and phrasing of text in the same language and has nothing to do with faithfully translating a text from one language to another. If the translation program "rewrites" the text in this way, then it's not an accurate rendering of the original and is not a translation. They are two entirely different types of programs, so your quote is irrelevant, and your claim that I'm trying to "get away with" violating the guidelines is junk.

If Lit wants to include machine translations under its AI policy guidelines, that's fine, it should do so to settle the matter once and for all, and I'll abide by that; but don't gaslight me by claiming the guidelines say something they clearly do not say.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Okay.

 

[Bramblethorn]

This refers to writing aid programs that alter the tone and phrasing of text in the same language and has nothing to do with faithfully translating a text from one language to another.

But "faithfully translating" between languages isn't really a thing, because languages don't map to one another one-to-one.

Even for two languages as closely related as English and German, a single sentence like "On the other side of the wall, you can see a star" has at least forty possible translations which differ significantly in meaning. To translate that properly, one needs to understand the meaning of the sentence, which requires understanding how it fits into the surrounding text.

On the other hand, if I have a character talking about how the Swedish Navy have started putting bar codes on their ships so they can scan the navy in, there is no satisfactory way to translate that into German (or most other languages). You can keep the literal meaning or you can have the character making a terrible pun, but you can't do both. Probably the best "translation" here would be to ditch literal translation entirely and replace it with some equally bad pun in German.

A machine translator which can do that kind of thing...is hard to find, but if it exists, then it's making the same kind of judgements that are involved in rewriting an English sentence, which probably requires it to be trained on translations performed by humans who were making such judgements, which raises the same kind of ownership issues.

 

[engelkuchkuch]

I'm currently having the same problem with Kasumi_Lee.
I'm a fresh new author in Lit.
I summitted my first story for the contest nude day theme this month.
Got rejected - AI issue.
I use chatgpt to translate.
I think around 95% the translation is quite good. Ai has become advanced.
It's not doing word by word translation. But within context.

I still edit the result, because there are often minor mistakes. For example, I might want to use “Ms.” instead of “Mrs.” — since in my language, there’s no distinction between those terms.
Or sometimes the translation doesn’t quite capture the poetic nuance of the original text I intended.
In those cases, I ask ChatGPT to rephrase it in a more poetic way, but still within the tone and nuance I originally created.
or translating jokes, that's not easy, due cultural different of readers.

Lit wants originality of human touch within the words chosen in the writing.

But I think Literotica should treat translation differently from writing a story directly in English using AI.
In translation, the author is still expressing their own minds/words—they're just using AI to help convert those minds/words into English.
For authors who write in other languages, the creativity already happens in their native tongue. They're not relying heavy on AI to write the story—just to help translate it.

(Of course, then the workload will become heavier in trying to differentiate works of translation and Ai made stories)

I agree with Kasumi points.
Isn't human translation also use words that doesn't come out from the brain of the author?
Then if human translation is acceptable, why not AI?

Both brains work basically the same, where they got feed by Inputs:
Books of different authors
Knowledge from around the world.
Than they use all of that, to spit out an output.

I understand, Lit needs to create AI boundaries. Sometimes things aren't always a clear cut.
Because they intersect. Like in this case, AI Generated story and AI translation, both spit out words by AI.
The difference is the percentage of author creativity in the process.

If AI translation is not acceptable then... I guess, I won't be around.
I'm not too savy in English, or have the budget to hire a translator service.

 

[Voboy]

I'm sure it's been mentioned here, but Laurel and Manu are taking the position that all the material published here is, to the best of their awareness, free of AI content. A translation that stems from an AI is obviously something they wouldn't want posted; that makes a lot of sense to me, since the final product is what they care about more than its precursors.

I think I understand the thrust of the OP's counterargument: her work was not AI-generated in the first instance, so the translation of it must also be good to go. But I suspect Laurel's reply would be that the translation IS AI-generated, and that alone disqualifies it for publication here. Under their current zero-tolerance mindset, that makes sense.

It'd be nice if a clear policy emerged, or if the site would explain this to the OP...

 

[StillStunned]

I think Lit wants originality of human touch within the words chosen in the writing.

But I think Literotica should treat translation differently from writing a story directly in English using AI.
In translation, the author is still expressing their own minds/words—they're just using AI to help convert those minds/words into English.
For authors who write in other languages, the creativity already happens in their native tongue. They're not relying heavy on AI to write the story—just to help translate it.

(Of course, then the workload will become heavier in trying to differentiate works of translation and Ai made stories)

I agree with Kasumi points.
Isn't human translation also use words that doesn't come out from the brain of the author?
Then if human translation is acceptable, why not AI?

Both brains work basically the same, where they got feed by Inputs:
Books of different authors
Knowledge from around the world.
Than they use all of that, to spit out an output.

There are a few considerations here.

First, there's the legal side. I assume that one reason (probably not the only one, but certainly a factor) is that it's possible that AI scraping will be found to be copyright infringement. If so, Lit could be required to delete anything that used AI. Better to get ahead of that now than have to comply further down the road.

Second, Lit doesn't mind human translation the same way it doesn't mind human writing or human editing. It's all the work of humans, drawing on their own skills and abilities to create the best text they can. Translators don't take an author's words and replace them by the corresponding words in another language. If so, all you'd need is a large database.

Translators read the author's words, sentences and paragraphs, analyse what they're saying, what they're not saying, how they're saying it, and what the connotations are. They then transpose those words, sentences and paragraphs, the style, the hints and omissions, to try to replicate the original as closely as possible in another language.

And if you think that translating isn't creative, consider this. A writer thinks of a story, but that's only the first step. They have to choose the words to tell that story, and as everyone here will tell you, that's the hard part. What words convey the desired effect, what words keep the reader glued to the page, what words fit the writer's style, what words create the writer's world? That's what creative writing is. Otherwise you might as well put the idea in a PPT presentation.

And translators have to do exactly the same. That's creativity.

 

[engelkuchkuch]

First, I'm sure lit has considerations.
And they have to make decisions and boundaries that can't make everyone happy.
I'm not going to argue with them. I'm just giving them something to think about.
let's make that one clear first.

Second, man, AI has become very advanced and still progressing.
The translation is not that like stupid machine of long time ago. It can already analyze document and understand context. It knows how to choose words to set tones. Formal, cassual, judicial, chatgpt can do it.

Let's say if I feed it a paragraph of mine, it knows I was trying to be sarcasm, dramatic, hiperbolic, or ironic. It understood I was trying to make a joke and to be funny with words.

I would say Ai translation in this current age is in paar with human translation, in term of output. Although not perfect, still need monitoring, but highly acceptable at least for me.

Third, there will be authors like me, not too savvy in English. Can't write in English to express his/her ideas in novel terms. They will be probably gone.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Isn't human translation also use words that doesn't come out from the brain of the author?
Then if human translation is acceptable, why not AI?

If somebody translates one of my stories, I don't have the right to post that translation here without the translator's permission.

 

[Actingup]

I know there are a bunch of threads already active regarding AI rejection, but to my knowledge this is a unique case which hasn't been addressed yet.

Way back in June, I published a story called Ambush in a Hotel Room, and last week I submitted a German translation of the same story. By my count, I've published twenty stories or story chapters which are translations of English stories published either here or elsewhere. Yes, I used software to translate the stories, but all twenty translated submissions were approved, so until this morning I'd taken for granted that this doesn't count as AI-generated writing.

This morning, the German version of Ambush in a Hotel Room was sent back because Laurel (or whatever screening software she's using) flagged the story as AI generated. For the record, the original English version is entirely original to me, and the screening software must have thought so, too, or else the English version wouldn't have been approved in the first place. In fact, I've never used any program besides Microsoft Word to write or edit my stories, not even Grammarly or ProWriting Aid, which I think are massively overrated. I have resubmitted the translated story with an explanatory note, but without any changes to the story because it's not "AI generated" for reasons given below.

There is currently nothing in Literotica's AI Policy about the use of machine translation, and I hope that this is a false positive, because it would be preposterous (and pernicious) to define translated stories as "AI-generated". Translation software does use AI to improve the quality of the translations, but "generating" a translation is nothing more than converting original text from one language into another. The translation program doesn't actually "generate" any original text, it's simply translating the user's writing.

The AI Policy claims that programs which replace "original human written text with generic AI generated text" are also problematic, but this too doesn't and shouldn't apply to machine translation. Even if the translation program provides options for different translations, these options have to do with how best to translate the original human-written text, and so can't be considered a form of "rewriting" human-written text, especially since the program would simply be replacing it's own translation (of the human original) with an alternative translation.

I understand there probably aren't too many users publishing translations of their stories, which might explain why it hasn't been dealt with before. It really does need to be addressed, because the notion that machine translations of original human-written stories should count as "AI-generated" is absurd. It would be like saying that a human translator of a story should be credited as the "original" author of the story instead of for translating someone else's work, entitling them to the copyright and the royalties.

For what it's worth...
a) I think it's perfectly reasonable to request clear policy guidelines on this.
b) I would lean towards putting the onus on machine translation on the user. If they want to click a browser button that says 'translate into....', then they can do so, accepting that it won't be the same as a professional translation.
Best of luck clarifying this!

 

[engelkuchkuch]

If somebody translates one of my stories, I don't have the right to post that translation here without the translator's permission.

Great, then AI translation will have less hassle.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Great, then AI translation will have less hassle.

Not really, no.

With a human translation, the legal situation is clear and as long as the translator and the author both give permission, there's no obstacle. With an AI translation, the legal situation is much less clear.

 

[engelkuchkuch]

Not really, no.

With a human translation, the legal situation is clear and as long as the translator and the author both give permission, there's no obstacle. With an AI translation, the legal situation is much less clear.

If we search for it, then it could be more clear.
If the original work is our.
We have the right to translate it.

Regarding the legal situation of AI translation,
Chatgpt TOS says:
https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

4.1. Generally. Customer and Customer’s End Users may provide Input and receive Output. As between Customer and OpenAI, to the extent permitted by applicable law, Customer: (a) retains all ownership rights in Input; and (b) owns all Output. OpenAI hereby assigns to Customer all OpenAI’s right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output.

summarize: Input and output from chatgpt is ours.

The next question, how about the applicable law above chatgpt TOS?

Well, I've watched a youtube video regarding the matter.

And the conclusion, it is allowed.
Because the translation is derived from our own original work.
We are not asking the AI to write a story for us, which could derive from other people works.
Which have big potential of infringement.

If the argument were:
yeah, but for the AI to be able to translate it needs to consume many knowledge from other written books.
Well, isn't human translator do the same?

 

[TheWritingGroup]

No one is arguing that you don't have the right to translate your story.

Laurel has the right to not publish it. You are free to publish it somewhere else.

--Annie

 

[ElectricBlue]

If the argument were:
yeah, but for the AI to be able to translate it needs to consume many knowledge from other written books.
Well, isn't human translator do the same?

A human translator has learned their skill, not scraped it from the writing of others. An AI translator depends on the published content of others to learn the rules. It's not really comparable. In any event, this site doesn't publish AI derived or assisted content, so I'm afraid you're whipping a dead horse.

 

[StillStunned]

If the argument were:
yeah, but for the AI to be able to translate it needs to consume many knowledge from other written books.
Well, isn't human translator do the same?

No. A human translator can translate without ever having read a book. It might not be the best translation in the world, but someone who speaks two languages can theoretically translate from one into the other. Children who grow up in a bilingual environment translate between languages before they can read.

AI is little more than predictive text: "given these words, the next word is likely to be this."

Also, I wouldn't ascribe much value to whatever ChatGPT says about copyright.

 

[Voboy]

No one is arguing that you don't have the right to translate your story.

Laurel has the right to not publish it. You are free to publish it somewhere else.

--Annie

At the end of the day, this really is the only point that matters.

AI translations might be perfectly awesome and completely innocuous, and a mountain of research might back that up. But if Laurel doesn't like it (and she doesn't, at the moment), it's not getting published here.