Even if it is only translation, I am not interested in reading LLM output in the context of a book, and I would feel betrayed if I learned that the translation was machine-generated if I had purchased a copy.
For the amount you’re charging, you could have hired a human translator. Either way, just like with a book translated by a human, you should disclose that the actual words in the book were not written by you. “Author: Vivian Voss, Translated By: Claude Opus” or whatever.
I’m sure others feel differently, and you may find success among that crowd.
A book is partly for the writer, and this one was largely for me: an ode to FreeBSD that I needed to write, partly to put years of practice into something durable, partly to have the conversation with myself before time ran out. If reading it is a problem because of how it was made, that is your call to make and a perfectly defensible one.
For what it is worth, I share serious concerns about AI in some directions: video that erases the line between record and fabrication, automated profiling pipelines that make consequential decisions about people without anyone being able to inspect them. Those are not theoretical worries. Where I differ from your line is on a translator-editor whose every paragraph I read, push back on, rewrite and re-read until it sits the way I want it. That is closer to a publishing-house edit pass than to generative output, in my experience.
I would not ask you to read it. The book is going to be what it is, and you are going to be where you stand, and those two facts can coexist without much fuss.
Whoever owned your domain 10 years prior is not important to this matter, I was just pointing it out that it was very likely not you.
> One aside, in genuine astonishment rather than complaint: it is striking how multifaceted a picture of a stranger can be drawn from a WHOIS record, an Amazon sample and a GitHub page. I have read it with more curiosity than dismay, and learned things about myself in the process.
Well, in my opinion that's your fault entirely. All your descriptions are rather vague on all your networks, which makes this whole thing more suspicious.
> Slop in the AI-slop sense it is not. Heavily edited and translated, yes. Authored, structured, fact-checked and re-read line by line by a man in Germany having rather more fun with this than he had expected, also yes.
Thanks for being transparent with this. I didn't find any mention of that before in your site, so that's good to know.
> Now it is up to you to dig further and keep me on my toes. Ask away. One small request: stay fair.
Once again, I want to be fair and this is nothing personal. I'm not digging any further either. I did change my original comment from "This is 100% AI Slop" to "This seems AI Slop" minutes after I posted it, because I want to acknowledge that I might be wrong.
However, I want you to take my comment more like the one from a possible costumer (after all, I have huge interest in the subject and that was what drove me to do it) who wanted to do some research on an author before spending $90 on their book. This is a platform for discussions, I also raised that concern so other could chime in.