In February, the Korean media world was shocked when it was reported that a translator used artificial intelligence tools to win a digital comic award in a major contest.
According to the evening newspaper Bunka Ilbo and other sources, the winner of the newcomer’s award in the webtoon category of the awards sponsored by the Literature Translation Institute (LTI Korea) was a Japanese woman who barely understood Korean.
She used an AI-assisted translation app, Papago, to translate a provisional Japanese version of a Korean webtoon before correcting jargon and awkward expressions.
LTI Korea told Asahi Shimbun that it learned about the use of Papago through media reports after the organization selected recipients.
The institute considered stripping the award.
However, when the people involved compared the award-winning work with the original text translated by Papago, it was found that the winners based on their understanding of the characters, tried to embody the goodness of web comics, such as the rhythmic expression of lines and panels, from various angles. I admit that I tried. Composition.
They concluded that there was no need to withdraw the award as the recipient’s hard work and cultural understanding were reflected in her work.
The news took the Japanese translation industry by surprise.
“I speak both Japanese and Korean, but I also use Papago as a reference,” said Kim Seung-bok, president of the Tokyo-based Korean book publishing company Quon, which also hosts translation contests. rice field. “I think that denying AI completely is the same as denying civilization.”
But Kim is wondering how to handle AI-assisted translation in the next contest, which will start accepting entries in September.
“This contest aims to measure how well contestants can use literary expressions in their work,” she said. “We can’t put much effort into confirming whether the AI translation service was used.”
Intrusion of new technology
The art community is no stranger to the rise of AI, with some creators puzzled by its sudden presence and others excited by the new opportunities it offers.
Either way, creators seem to have no choice but to find ways to work with rapidly evolving AI technology.
Some artists are actively using AI to inspire their creativity.
Billed as “Japan’s first short film written by an AI,” Boy Sprouted aired last year as part of an international film festival.
Hiroshi Itsuki, who developed the story-generating AI system Furukoto, which was used to write the script, said, “The finished film was completely different from what I had imagined at first.”
Initially, engineers thought AI would create entire stories based on simple loglines provided by human users.
But when AI produces hard-to-understand works of art, commercial realization is difficult, so he gave AI the classic tale of a boy and his family’s relationship being restored.
After acknowledging that AI can create many stories in a short time, Hiroki Tawada, who co-wrote the screenplay with Furukoto, said, “It is important to carefully read each piece of text generated by AI and judge its value. is very stressful,” he added.
When I was writing the script, I noticed a strange sentence “Boy, something is sprouting” among the huge amount of sentences generated by AI.
The director and producers were also interested in the sentence.
The production members were excited by the unexpected results, and expanded the range of interpretations, such as perhaps pointing to the emergence of self-consciousness.
Mr. Tawada placed sentences that most humans would not have thought of as the core of the creative process, and had AI repeatedly generate sentences that could be used in the scenes before and after the manifestation of the core concept to write the story.
Itsuki says, “For the time being, I changed my mind, thinking that it would be better for humans and AI to work together to create creative works.”
help with the opera
Performer and composer Tomomi Adachi had AI write the libretto for his opera “Romeo wa Juliet,” which premiered in 2021.
He was cautious about how music amplified the emotions evoked by words, and was uncomfortable with being easily influenced by such emotions, so he composed very little music with lyrics. .
But Adachi said he was able to distance himself from AI-generated words based on Shakespeare’s classic plays because he felt he was faced with the question, “What are emotions in the first place?” Told.
“This method allowed me to compose an opera,” he said.
Amid concerns that AI could replace many jobs in the cultural field and standardize creative output, Adachi emphasized the potential.
“Humans are already affected by AI’s algorithms in some way. So I would rather bet on the possibility of it broadening our perception rather than warning about it,” he said. I was. “I want AI to create things that we have never been able to do.”
(This article was written by Mayumi Mori, Masato Nishida, and Aiko Masuda.)
