On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports on Amazon’s launch of Kindle Translate, an AI-powered tool that allows translations between English, Spanish, and German. He discusses how it could open new markets for authors while raising questions about accuracy and the role of human translators. Dan also covers Australia’s decision to reject a text and data mining exception to copyright law, a win for authors and creatives concerned about AI training practices, and shares updates on the ongoing Anthropic settlement affecting writers worldwide.
Listen to the Podcast: Amazon Launches Kindle Translate
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Welcome to the Self-Publishing News, and welcome to what I hope is a better sound on a better microphone.
As those of you who were there for ALLi's podcast on the Anthropic settlement will know, my microphone died before I could offer my perspective on the international aspects of the Anthropic settlement.
The webinar as it stands will be circulated and it will be made available, so do keep an eye out for that. It was an incredibly helpful session, giving advice on the legal position in the US and internationally, and specifically giving clear and actionable advice about what authors can and should do in order to express an interest being part of the class and to make a claim part of the class.
That class, of course, being rights holders of works that were downloaded in pirated form from either Library Genesis or Pirate Library Mirror by Anthropic for the training of their Claude AI large language model.
Amazon Launches Kindle Translate
AI is indeed dominating the news this week, and the main news in indie land is the launch of Amazon's Kindle Translate.
It's an AI-powered translation tool. It translates between Spanish and English, and by that I understand it to mean it will translate from Spanish into English, and it will translate from English into Spanish. It also translates from German into English. So, it is quite limited at the moment, but it does offer up access to one of the largest global markets, and that's the Spanish speaking global market.
The reason behind this, Amazon has said, is that at present, only 5% or fewer of the titles available on Amazon are available in more than one language. So, a massive proportion of potential market is not being exploited, and potential rights are not being exploited by rights holders.
Those of you who have been around for some time, or even a year or so, will know that this is the case that was originally made in favor of AI voice generation tools. That at present there is a largely under exploited set of rights because so few titles that could be available in these different formats are actually available in them.
Just as AI voice generation was pitched as a way of not replacing human voice narrators, but of offering up possibilities for those who couldn't afford human voice narrators, so Kindle Translate is pitching itself, not as replacing translation services, but as offering a way for people who can't afford a translator to enter the translation market and expand the way that they exploit their rights and their work.
One of the interesting things that they say is that they're aware that the AI-generated translation is not perfect and they are therefore, making available are an option either to publish straight away or to check what you have published.
As several people have pointed out, this means that in order to check the translation, you probably need a translator anyway. So, therefore the cost benefit might be less than you think. Otherwise, you're putting out their translations whose reliability you really don't know. Obviously, there will be a reputational potential risk with that.
I've yet to see the reaction from the translation community. I do know that, as I've reported in the past, translators are amongst those who have reported concerns, and not only concerns about AI, but actual loss of things to AI translation.
Obviously, we also know platforms like Duolingo have been very controversial in their use of AI. So, I imagine there will be a response and when there is, I will of course report on it.
Also rounding out the news, another AI story.
Australian Creator Wins Against Text Data Mining Exceptions
This time, thanks to Anna Featherstone, our Australian Ambassador, for bringing us a win for creatives in Australia.
This is about data mining exceptions and text data mining exceptions. Those of you who have been following this column and podcast for a while will remember that the UK carried out a consultation about whether there should be an exception to copyright law for text data mining. It's a very dry sounding subject, but actually the details are really important, because a data mining exception essentially means that the copyright law that applies to you and I, if you own a big tech company and you need to use large data sets to train your large language models, the copyright law wouldn't necessarily apply to you.
There would be an exception in copyright law if what you are doing is using a large dataset to train AI.
It's something that tech firms see as being essential to being able to innovate and expand, and offer what they see as improving services; services that benefits humankind and fit innovation.
It's something, obviously that is very much of concern to creators because copyright law is something that provides us with protection, and if technological firms are allowed to get around copyright law because they are exempt from it, then this means that a large proportion of the redress that is available to us and the ability to opt-in, opt-out, to consent to works being used in certain ways that you would expect as a rights holder to be able to consent to, is taken away.
Anyway, in Australia, there has been a campaign from the Australian Society of Authors to make sure that there wasn't a text data mining exception put in place in their copyright law, and the Australian government have now announced that there will not be such an exception.
This has met with great favor from the authors and author's representative communities in Australia. So, thank you to Anna, who was also one of the participants in the Anthropic settlement webinar, giving a perspective on what that means for Australian authors.
So, thank you to her for pointing me to that and great news to show that pressure from creative groups can actually affect the decisions that are made at a national level.
With that, I look forward to speaking to you at the same time next week.
