April 28th, 2025
The experiment began with a must-read in WIRED magazine on how to think about AI and our relationship to it, via an interview with Andrea Colamedici, author of the book “Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality.”
“It’s not just a book but a philosophical experiment, a performance. My aim was to raise awareness,” Colamedici told WIRED. “I observed that (my students) were losing an understanding of life by relying on AI… we must keep our curiosity alive while using this tool correctly.”
Colamedici wrote the book and published it through his (co-founded) publishing company, Edizioni Tlon, based in Rome, Italy. Here’s the kicker: he published it as if authored by Jianwei Xun “a Hong Kong-born philosopher based in Berlin,” with himself serving as translator.
You’ll want to read the WIRED article for the more detailed specifics, but the short version is something like this: the co-author of the ideation phase of the book was ChatGPT, though the words are all Colamedici’s. It was not translated from the Chinese; there is no Jianwei Xun.
Intrigued, I wanted to read the book immediately. But there is no English version. The book is currently available only in the Italian original and in Spanish and French translations.
Here is the book, “Ipnocrazia: Trump, Musk e la nuova architettura della realtà” by Janwei Xun, at the Edizioni Tlon website.
https://shop.tlon.it/prodotto/ipnocrazia-trump-musk-e-la-nuova-architettura-della-realta-janwei-xun/
This afternoon I bought the Italian ebook for 7.99 Euros (about $9) and downloaded my purchase. The file had no DRM (digital rights management file locking), so I didn’t need to illegally remove the copy protection to load the book into Calibre. I then converted the EPUB to a .docx file that I uploaded to Claude. I then requested an English translation of the 22,000-word file. (I don’t know if Claude could have ingested the EPUB file. Perhaps. But these LLMs seem to have some delicate digestive systems.)
Claude, of course, ran into limits, “max length for a message,” but I pushed it to completion. I then converted the English .docx back to EPUB via Google Docs and opened that ebook in Calibre and on my Kobo ereader.
I can now read the English version.
My first thoughts: Have I broken any laws, or abrogated any rights? If I paid my Italian friend to read it to me live in translation, would that be any different from a rights perspective? When Edizioni Tlon sells the English-language rights to a U.S. publisher, could I then be somehow charged with illegal access to the book?
Let’s revisit the current process for publishers and the book rights, assuming the case of a U.S. author.
Most prominent authors are represented by literary agents. These agent are responsible for selling (licensing) all of the rights to unpublished manuscripts, and to continue to do so after publication. In a tightly-controlled deal, the U.S. book publisher may have bought only U.S. English-language rights — the agent will separately sell rights into other countries and other languages, and for various other media instances, such as film rights, or periodical excerpts. (Even if the U.S. publisher acquired some of these other rights, they will exercise equally tight control.)
The agent (or publisher) takes the manuscript and begins to shop it. Much of the selling takes place face-to-face, at annual book fairs in Frankfurt, London, Guadalajara, Bologna, and some lesser events. The foreign-language publisher then commissions a translation, and the translated manuscript goes through all of the complex machinations that every manuscript endures. The result is that foreign editions, for all but the top-flight titles, rarely appear until two or more years after original publication.
When I purchased the Italian edition of Ipnocrazia I had no way to know if the rights to publish the book in English has already been sold to a U.S. publisher. Several people have have said to me: but you were only translating it for your personal use. OK. So what if, when the English language version is published, multiple people continue to buy a foreign-language version (perhaps because it’s less expensive) and translate their copies into English, rather than purchasing the authorized English-language version? I know this is unlikely to occur — I’m speculating whether this would be, technically, illegal. The reasoning behind my speculation is to highlight the complexities of the way book rights are currently marketed around the world in various territories.
AI could upset the balance of rights sales. As indicated, getting books into foreign editions just takes too darn long. It doesn’t much matter for the average novel. But this process can render topical nonfiction books unmarketable. Ipnocrazia is very much a book of the current moment — I’ll be surprised if it’s of enduring interest two years from now.
An efficient system of rapid AI translation would solve the problem, but it would upend the existing process.
The upside of selling rights abroad is that the foreign publisher, intimately familiar with its own marketplace, makes a cash commitment, and is therefore committed to trying to sell the book. They know the local media and the social media and the booksellers. That matters.
If I translate and publish my own book in German or Spanish (or 29 other languages) as I have done, no one in Germany or Spain is likely to hear about it. If instantaneous translations become a standard practice, the structure of the rights system would inevitably shift.
My exploration with Ipnocrazia offers a scenarios where AI could upend the market for international book rights sales. But there is still so much to be thought through, so much to be worked through.