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.
Completely 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 original publisher’s 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 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 .docx. I uploaded the .docx to Claude and 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.
I can now read the English version.
My first thoughts: Have I broken any laws? Is this English translation a transformative work? If I paid my Italian friend to read it to me live in translation, would that be any different from a copyright perspective? When Edizioni Tlon sells the English-language rights to a U.S. publisher, could I then be charged with theft?
Let’s revisit the current process for U.S. publishers. An agent or a publisher (depending on who has control of the rights) takes a manuscript and begins to shop it in international markets for foreign publication, mostly through translated editions. Much of the selling takes place, face-to-face, at annual book fairs in London, Frankfurt, Guadalajara, Bologna, and some lesser events. Midlist books will often be published in English before any foreign rights are sold. 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.
The upside is that a foreign publisher, intimately familiar with its own marketplace, makes a cash commitment, and is 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.
But then, another thought: I could have ElevenLabs read the translated book to me, perhaps using the voice of Bill L. Oxley, part of ElevenLabs “John Wayne™ Rugged Men Voice Collection.” ElevenLabs’ approach to audiobooks is in some ways the most radical part of this experiment. Publishers are making a killing on audiobooks right now, deservedly so, but their model relies on standalone audiobook files, with encoded narration. ElevenLabs lets people listen to their owned books on-the-fly, with any of dozens of available voices. ElevenLabs earns money from your software subscription, but none of that is conveyed to the author or the publisher.
Publishers are able to hobble ElevenLabs’ ingenious efforts via DRM. DRM can’t be removed legally without permission, so ebooks purchased from Amazon et al. cannot be listened to on-the-fly via AI voice technology. You need to still pay extra for the audiobook, and for the voice that the publisher thinks is best-suited. There are several billion dollars in retail sales at stake here — this is unlikely to change any time soon.
I think that AI is going to upend the markets for international book rights sales, and, more slowly, for audiobooks. But there is still so much to be thought through, so much to be worked through.