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But it wouldn't be fair to force people to have disclaimers like that. It's like forcing authors to reveal whether a book was ghostwritten. It's nobody's business really and the vast majority of readers don't care, except the loud minority which makes most of the noise.

I don't think anyone's talking about forcing people to have disclaimers, though I can see forcing people to declare if they've used AI as more than an assistive technology. (Though yes, that would be difficult to enforce or even to define properly. It would clearly be work to have a viable system.)

Ghostwriting raises neither the ethical nor the legal issues that AI does. Nor does ghostwriting significantly increase demand on already overworked electrical grids. I think that's an apples and oranges kind of comparison.

As I've said, customers should have the right to know certain things about the way products they buy are manufactured.

Customers have the right to know if they ask but even then, magicians don't have to reveal their secrets do they?

It's a fair comparison cuz the author technically didn't write the book. And that's the main thing. I'm sure some got in trouble for ghostwriters plagiarising too, it can happen. So maybe not an ideal example but correlation is there.

First time I hear concerns about electrical grids and I don't see people worrying about it, they just open mobile ChatGPT app and type in the question. The scale at which AI uses power is too big to grasp for us civilians... tho a fair concern nonetheless.

Tolkien is in many respects one of a kind. Star Trek fans did create a Klingon language, but that was a community project, not the work of one person.

Remember that Shakespeare was written for a listening audience, not a reading audience. Critics have pointed out that some of the words he used can have multiple meanings, sometimes signaled by particular spelling. (In an age before spelling was standardized, there were apparently a lot more homonyms.) Anyway, Shakespeare might have wanted one word to have more than one meaning, which his more sophisticated listeners would have appreciated. Consigning the text to writing forces a choice among those meanings. Shakespeare himself did publish a few of his plays, but it is clear that there were variations in the written text even during his own lifetime, which is partially do to the difficulty of spoken words with multiple meanings. Recently, critics have swung in the direction of regarding the First Folio Hamlet and the Quarto Hamlet as two separate versions rather than trying to homogenize them into one single work, as had been the case for centuries. But of course, the original text was fluid. We know from contemporary references that actors made changes, sometimes on the spur of the moment, and that the company sometimes used a different version for a royal performance than had been used at the Globe.

In other words, the transfer from listening audience to reading audience may itself be an act of translation--and not always an easy one.     

In practice, the desire for an audience means that authors, even those who prioritize art over profit, need to be thinking about what people want to read...

The Art-first folks rarely consider the audience. It's this disregard that allows them to push the envelope. It's how we got Alice in Wonderland and 1984 and On the Road and Naked Lunch and Dhalgren and The Handmaid's Tale and The Martian and The Three Body Problem and everything Hunter S. Thompson.

Henry Ford: "If I asked the people what they wanted they would have asked for faster horses."

Probably quite apocryphal, but it makes the point. The audience doesn't know what it wants until we show them. They know what they've enjoyed in the past but cannot imagine anything new.

If you let the accounting drive creativity, you just get more of the same, and then you're relying on your craftsmanship - which is pretty common in the modern world.

The difference being, anyone can learn to be a craftsman, to build a chair. But it takes an Artist who is prioritizing their Art to reimagine what a chair can be. Craftsmen don't disrupt markets, neither do bean counters.

Saying we can prioritize both is just rationalization. I think it stems from not being comfortable with either the straight business side of things (selling sh*t on the internet) or the Artist side (perceived pretentiousness). At the end of the day, we are all Artists - we create stuff. And we are also craftsmen selling sh*t on the internet.

But muddying the waters between these goals (profit v Art) is typically bad for the Art, and even worse for sales.

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Also, the underlying motivation is different. Artists are seeking validation. Business folks are seeking financial reward. One makes you feel good about yourself, the other pays the rent.

Not the same.

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Also also, innovation is a different beast altogether.

But it wouldn't be fair to force people to have disclaimers like that. It's like forcing authors to reveal whether a book was ghostwritten. It's nobody's business really and the vast majority of readers don't care, except the loud minority which makes most of the noise.

I don't think anyone's talking about forcing people to have disclaimers, though I can see forcing people to declare if they've used AI as more than an assistive technology. (Though yes, that would be difficult to enforce or even to define properly. It would clearly be work to have a viable system.)

Ghostwriting raises neither the ethical nor the legal issues that AI does. Nor does ghostwriting significantly increase demand on already overworked electrical grids. I think that's an apples and oranges kind of comparison.

As I've said, customers should have the right to know certain things about the way products they buy are manufactured.

Often, too, there aren't exact translations for some words or phrases, so you'll have some artistic license based on how the translator decided to translate something. 

Oh, I'm well aware of all that.  There comes a point, though, where the differences are stark enough that you can't just shrug them all away as translation quirks, and that's what I'm talking about here.

As to your point, though, I saw an interesting example just a few days ago.  It's from the LOTR movies.  Check it out, and pay attention to the German version:





At 3:45, Theoden says "ein Bluttag," which literally translates to "a blood day" or "a bloody day" even though the English version is, "a red day."  Now, one can make the case that the day is red because of the blood that's about to be spilled, so the two words would then be interchangeable in this context, but I think it's more than that.  Remember that Tolkien was a master philologist, and if he wanted to limit that phrase to literal blood, he could have easily done it.  He would have just called it a blood day.  No, I think the use of red here is meant to be more all-encompassing: it includes the blood that's about to be spilled, sure, but it also includes rage, the "seeing red" of a man who has completely lost control and given into his anger and bloodlust.  It's as much about passion, particularly the passion of mortal combat and the berserker spirit, as it is about literal blood.  Perhaps even more so.  Like so much of the rest of the book, it's as much spiritual as it is material.

Yeah, I think the German translator dropped the ball here.   

On the subject of Tolkien, never forget that the guy not only invented several languages for his story, but the languages all work according to the rules of language, and he then proceeded to write poems in those languages, and the poems have rhyme and meter as poems should.  It's folly to underestimate him.