Assuming this is all true, at least for me personally, the level of generative AI involvement here still puts me off the project completely.
Even if it is only translation, I am not interested in reading LLM output in the context of a book, and I would feel betrayed if I learned that the translation was machine-generated if I had purchased a copy.
For the amount you’re charging, you could have hired a human translator. Either way, just like with a book translated by a human, you should disclose that the actual words in the book were not written by you. “Author: Vivian Voss, Translated By: Claude Opus” or whatever.
I’m sure others feel differently, and you may find success among that crowd.
mplanchard, that is a fair position, and I do not propose to argue you out of it.
A book is partly for the writer, and this one was largely for me: an ode to FreeBSD that I needed to write, partly to put years of practice into something durable, partly to have the conversation with myself before time ran out. If reading it is a problem because of how it was made, that is your call to make and a perfectly defensible one.
For what it is worth, I share serious concerns about AI in some directions: video that erases the line between record and fabrication, automated profiling pipelines that make consequential decisions about people without anyone being able to inspect them. Those are not theoretical worries. Where I differ from your line is on a translator-editor whose every paragraph I read, push back on, rewrite and re-read until it sits the way I want it. That is closer to a publishing-house edit pass than to generative output, in my experience.
I would not ask you to read it. The book is going to be what it is, and you are going to be where you stand, and those two facts can coexist without much fuss.