Some weeks the big American courtroom noise dies down and you can hear the smaller conversations and this was one of those. No landmark ruling, no billion-dollar headline, just two modest refusals from the sort of people who usually get written out without a byline, and it might be the more useful issue, because the smaller rooms are where the argument actually gets decided.
Start in Japan, because the manga-translation push I flagged a fortnight ago has shipped a product. Shueisha marked its hundredth birthday with Manga Million, a free app carrying a million pages across nearly four hundred titles in more than a hundred languages, which sounds like a birthday present to the world until you read the credits. The older, previously published English translations keep their translators’ names. The new ones list company names only, no humans at all. One translator told Comics Beat, on condition that nobody could name them, that “there are human translators who worked on these that are not being credited,” and that they’re contractually barred from saying so out loud. The editor-in-chief insists no Ai was involved, yet one credited firm, Flitto, openly gathers data for “high-quality LLM translation,” and the letterer Lys Blakeslee called withholding names “an exploitative and outdated practice.” Localisation is how thousands of people get their first paid foot in this trade, and here it’s the broken ladder redrawn as an org chart, quietly de-peopled while everyone smiles about global reach.
Closer to home, the fight got organised. This weekend (8th and 9th August) the Caption festival in Oxford runs a panel called Small Press Versus AI, and Broken Frontier ran a piece by its organiser, Amy Letts, ahead of it. Letts isn’t theorising from a distance. She reckons at least two hundred and fifty of her own artworks have been scraped to train generative models, without a word of consent or a penny of payment, and she’s blunt that the companies dressed systemic theft up as “Fair Use” and dared anyone to stop them. The panel puts Hannah Berry, Karrie Fransman and KitsuneArt in a room to show that small-press creators aren’t powerless, and I should have been sitting there with them, but I’ll be in transit to the States instead, which stings more than I expected it to. Last week I watched a comics legend tell a London crowd that Ai can’t be creative, this week it’s people with no legend to trade on, saying much the same thing and meaning to act on it.
I’d like to extend my apologies again to the organisers and attendees of Caption who I feel like I’ve let down over my absence.
Underneath both stories sits the thing I wrote about back in June in The Shortcut That Goes Nowhere, which is what happens to a person when the working out gets done somewhere else. A translator nobody credits is also a translator nobody is training, and a teenager who prompts rather than draws is skipping the exact stretch where the skill forms. The research keeps pointing the same way, with the MIT EEG work finding weaker connectivity and weaker recall in people who let the model do the thinking, and Torunn Grønbekk’s daughter sitting down to grind four hours a day by hand because she’d already worked out that the doing is the learning. Outsourcing the thought feels like efficiency right up until you need the thought back.
There’s also line in the book’s foreword that keeps returning on weeks like this. Pat Mills, who built 2000AD and has never once done diplomacy, opens by warning that his critique of the industry won’t please anyone “because I feel it has been betrayed.” He meant the trade selling out its working-class, 9-to-16 readership decades ago and chasing prestige instead. Read it now and that betrayal has simply found a new floor. It took the readers first. Now it’s reaching the translators and the jobbing artists, each written out a single contract at a time, while the people upstairs keep calling it progress. What links this week’s two stories is the method. There’s rarely a sacking anyone can point to, just a non-disclosure clause on one side of the world, a “Fair Use” shrug on the other, and the work quietly changing hands.
Last week I said I’d be watching for what a fair test of human authorship even looks like, and I still am. The marks that exist so far, the Authors Guild’s seal and the Society of Authors’ logo, feel more like a sticking plaster than a standard, with carve-outs wide enough to walk a model straight through. I’ll park it again, though, because on Sunday there’ll be a room in Oxford full of people who make comics with their hands, working out loud whether saying no is still a real option or just a nice noise, and I’d rather hear what they concluded than guess at it from thirty thousand feet. If you’re there, tell me how it went.
Anyway. Bit shallow this week because it’s slow news… but I’m travelling to the U.S on Sunday to take part in a week of round-tables about Ai and Agentic, so I imagine after a few days of Waymo and nerd chatter I’ll have better intel. In the meantime riddle me this;
Further reading
Manga Million launches with nearly 400 titles and uncredited translators: Comics Beat
Caption’s Amy Letts on small press fighting back against generative Ai, ahead of the festival’s August panel: Broken Frontier
Ongoing thread, the authentication question: the Authors Guild expands its “Human Authored” certification, and the Ai carve-outs stir debate: Complete AI Training