Frankfurt Buchmesse

'Those who use artificial intelligence are fences'

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, writers and translators try to fight against the biggest theft in history: that of the texts on which Llm, the large-scale language models, are trained

by Lara Ricci

21 October 2025

5' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

5' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

"I call it 'recel': when you benefit from a theft knowing that your benefit originates from a crime": using artificial intelligence is reception for Jörn Cambreleng, director of Atlas, an association for the promotion of literary translation. Llm, the large-scale language models have been trained on texts, images, forms produced by human ingenuity, covered by copyright.

«La capacità dei sistemi di intelligenza artificiale è resa possibile dal maggior furto di dati e della storia» aveva detto l’anno scorso Karin Schmidt-Friderichs, presidentessa della German publishers & booksellers association, durante la conferenza stampa di apertura della fiera del libro di Francoforte, la più grande al mondo. Un anno dopo, alla Buchmesse la battaglia è ancora aperta, ed è delle più impari: contro i giganti della tecnologia si devono battere i traduttori, gli scrittori, i giornalisti, i fotografi, gli artisti, professioni perlopiù terribilmente sottopagate e senza garanzie, sottolinea Francesca Novajra, presidentessa del Ceatl, l’European council of literary translator’s association (incarico non stipendiato), cui fanno parte Aiti e Strade per l’Italia. La risposta dell’Unione europea è per loro del tutto insoddisfacente (e quella dell’Italia ancora di più), per esempio l’Ai Act prevede che le società di intelligenza artificiale debbano dichiarare solo il 10%

Novajra explains how transparency is needed: 'transparency to know which texts have been produced with artificial intelligence, transparency about the texts on which the Ai has been trained, and transparency about the output, to calculate the licences'. The battle against AI is not only an economic one, because of the impact it has on the publishing industry and on jobs related to writing, it is a political, social battle - AI influences cognitive processes and power relations - and also a cultural one, because it also determines the content and the way cultural products are generated and distributed: it is an ethical battle.

There are the cognitive damages of the abdication of thinking, of writing, that begin to emerge, 'Ai is dangerous for critical thinking, and it is so in a very subtle way,' Novajra observes, 'besides introducing sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. errors and prejudices into texts, as Tiziana Catarci, professor of Computer Engineering at the Sapienza University of Rome, explains well, since Llm learns from the statistical analysis of the data it is given. If these data reflect mental schemes, cultural stereotypes or even prejudices of those who produced them, the machine takes them as models and re-proposes them'.

Also interesting was the small experiment by Waltraud Kolb, a translation researcher at the University of Vienna, who demonstrated the 'anchoring bias': she asked ten literary translators to translate a Hemingway short story (A Very Short Story), assigning five of them to translate from English into German from the original alone, and five others to translate from the original and a machine-generated 'pre-translation'. A seemingly very simple sentence: 'Luz sat on the bed', which, depending on how one reads it, can be understood as completed or unfinished (Luz sat or sat), was translated divergently among the translators in the first group, while the other five all chose the machine-generated translation.

We must also consider that 'to make artificial intelligence work, a lot of energy and raw materials are needed, the extraction of which can generate environmental disasters and thousands of deaths, as in the case of coltan in Congo', Cambreleng notes, adding that to make it work properly, for example in cancer diagnosis, a lot of doctors or medical students are employed in poor countries, underpaying them and depriving the country of their expertise.

'Ai is a new form of colonisation, digital. I will not support it until it makes all the languages and all the people who nurture it equally visible,' says Remi Armand Tchockote, professor of African literatures at the University of Vienna, during a meeting to remember the great Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o .

But in Frankfurt the climate seems to have changed, even though Schmidt-Friderichs, at this year's customary opening press conference of the Buchmesse, stated that 'our democratic society is particularly threatened by artificial intelligence in the hands of irresponsible digital oligopolies' and called for 'democratic decisions to establish transparency in the training of models, licences and incentives for fair remuneration for those who have produced what is fed to the models and for those who feed the social, data protection and for platforms to take responsibility for the content they publish'. He went on to observe that 'we know the additives in the yoghurt we eat, but we have no protection for our brains for whatever instagram or tik tok or Ai rain down on us'

In a large darkened hall, Josh Jarrett, senior vice-president of the famous American literary agency Wiley declaims in a firm voice, walking in stride: 'When faced with artificial intelligence, there are three possible strategies: that of the ostrich, who pretends not to see, that of the gardener, who builds a wall around his garden, and that of the surfer, who rides the wave'. A survey they carried out among 2,400 researchers reportedly showed that while last year 57% of researchers used Ai for work, now 84% would do so. Wiley has therefore developed a system to negotiate copyright on their clients' datasets and another to make them navigable through the user's preferred chatbot.

Anche altrove, su diversi palchi della fiera, prevale un pragmatismo che sa di resa e di opportunismo e non mancano gli entusiasti tecnofili (anche necrofili) che ancora una volta cercano di convincerci che la tecnologia (posseduta da altri) ci restituirà il tempo libero, come per esempio Niegel Newton, fondatore della casa editrice Bloomsbury, durante l’incontro «Come la creatività può abbracciare l’intelligenza artificiale» con l’imprenditore Nadim Sadek, autore di Quiver, don’t Quake, libro nel quale spiega - speriamo in modo più convincente di quanto lo sia stato durante la presentazione - come secondo lui l’Ai può aiutare a esprimere la creatività umana o Davar Ardalan, esperta di intelligenza artificiale, “storyteller” e figlia di Laleh Bakhtiar, studiosa, autrice e traduttrice americana di origine iraniana che ha realizzato una versione del Corano neutra rispetto al genere che ha spiegato come grazie all’intelligenza artificiale i lettori possono “dialogare” co

Mancava quest’anno a Francoforte una sessione come quella dello scorso anno che aggiornasse sui progressi legali sulla tutela della proprietà intellettuale di autori (scrittori, traduttori, giornalisti, artisti, fotografi etc.). Della vertenza in corso tra il New York Times contro OpenAI e Microsoft per aver violato con ChatGpt e Copilot la legge sul copyright non ci sono aggiornamenti, e anche solo questo mostra la difficoltà in cui ci si trova quando lo sviluppo tecnologico va molto più veloce della legge e della giustizia. Francesca Novajra, Jörn Cambreleng e altri rappresentanti delle associazioni dei lavoratori della cultura però ci aggiornano su alcune cause intentate in Europa (per ricevere aggiornamenti è molto utile la newsletter della Ceatl). La Gema, ad esempio, che è la Siae della Germania, a settembre ha dato il via a una causa contro OpenAi per aver usato il suo repertorio per insegnar

In the meantime, some publishing houses, such as the Dutch Veen Bosch & Keuning, have cleared the way for translation through artificial intelligence, while others, such as the French Calmann-Lévy, have announced that they will also put the translator's name on the cover, to enhance this profession in the face of the threats of artificial intelligence, as well as include the translator's biography on the back or back cover, as several publishing houses, including Italian ones, are already doing. The translator's name is also on the cover of the book

Lara Riccivicecaposervizio curatrice delle pagine di letteratura e poesia
Luogo: Milano e Ginevra
Lingue parlate: Inglese e francese correntemente, tedesco scolastico
Argomenti: Letteratura, poesia, scienza, diritti umani
Premi: Voltolino, Piazzano, Laigueglia, Quasimodo
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