Mark Seligman, a linguist and author of "AI and Ada: Artificial Translation and Creation of Literature," delves into the intersections of AI, machine translation, and literary creation. He explores how Nabokov's unique style serves as a test case for understanding translation challenges and AI's potential to replicate art. Seligman discusses the nuances of machine vs. human creativity, the future of AI-generated literature, and the philosophical questions surrounding intelligence and emotion, provoking reflections on the role of humans in an AI-driven world.
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Witness To Many Revolutions
Mark Seligman recounts living through multiple technological revolutions and watching change accumulate gradually over decades.
He uses his personal history to explain why he both recognizes AI's magnitude and tempers panic with pragmatic optimism.
question_answer ANECDOTE
How Nabokov Became The Lens
The book's origin began with an essay on artificial translation that used Nabokov's Onegin controversy as a case study.
Seligman chose Nabokov because his hyper-conscious, bilingual craft illustrates translation and artificial creativity issues vividly.
insights INSIGHT
Translation As Optimization
Seligman frames translation as an optimization problem where no single translation can perfectly preserve all textual facets simultaneously.
He argues AIs can learn human trade-offs or offer multiple translations each stressing different aspects to improve outcomes.
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Taking recent spectacular progress in AI fully into account, Mark Seligman's AI and Ada: Artificial Translation and Creation of Literature(Anthem Press, 2025) explores prospects for artificial literary translation and composition, with frequent reference to the hyperconscious literary art of Vladimir Nabokov. The exploration balances reader-friendly explanation (“What are transformers?”) and original insights (“What is intelligence? What is language?”) with personal and playful notes, and culminates in an assortment of striking demos
The book’s Preface places the current AI explosion in the context of other technological cataclysms and recounts the author’s personal (and not always deadly serious) AI journey. Chapter One (“Extracting the Essence”) assesses the potential of machine translationof literature, exploiting Nabokov’s hyperconscious literary art as a reference point. Chapter Two (“Toward an Artificial Nabokov”) goes on to speculate on possibilities for actual artificial creation of literature. Chapter Three (“Large Literary Models? Intelligence and Language in the LLM Era”) explains recent spectacular progress in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), as exemplified by Large Language Models like ChatGPT. On the way, the chapter ventures to tackle perennial questions (“What is intelligence?” “What is language?”) and culminates in an assortment of striking demos. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat with Mark Seligman to talk about how the current AI revolution fits into the long arc of cultural and technological shifts, Seligman's framing of the “Great Transition” between Humanity 1.0 and 2.0, Nabokov’s style as a lens for thinking about artificial creativity, the possibilities and limits of machine translation and literary artistry, and the philosophical stakes of whether AI-generated works can ever truly be considered art. Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.
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