I Have Published My Sixth Book — And GPT-4 Translated It Into German For Me

On Sunday I have published my sixth book, “Heartland Echoes” (Link), a collection of short stories about the American Midwest and fly-over states that included my short story “Bitter Blues”. Originally written for a writing contest in Germany, I soon realized that their formatting was not good. 3500 characters per story were allowed, but with their formatting I would have had to cut every story down by a half. So, I decided to pick Kindle Direct Publishing again.

Because I reside in Germany and I have German relatives and friends, I wanted to publish not only in English, but also in German language. However, I don’t translate my own books or I would start writing from the beginning once I see something I don’t like. I have used OpenAI’s API to access GPT-4.

This was great, because the publicly available model has limits for good on topics like violence, self-harm, and others. But as my stories do cover the problems and tragedies like domestic abuse, suicide, but also post-traumatic stress, it was great that GPT would have translated my texts without complaining about these issues as it does in the public version.

The German version was great except from just a few tiny mistakes or words that I would not have used. The prompt in usage was to translate the text from English into German so that it sounds like it has been written by a German native who is a professional writer. Due to the shortness of my stories I didn’t expect anything extraordinary, but it’s good enough that not only my family in Canada can read “Heartland Echoes”, no, even my German relatives can now read “Die Seelen Amerikas”. Both are now available on Amazon in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and many, many more.

Furthermore, I have used GPT to analyze characters in another project I am working on and to summarize the story, to review what I have written. To see how reliable it is, I also took a bad story from the internet — a really bad one — and saw that GPT indeed “understands” the differences between a story that is really bad and one that is at least somehow okay. GPT liked the story, but I am careful until I get feedback from a human being.

As somebody who is into creative writing since elementary school, I must admit that GPT is a really useful tool for analyzing, translating, but also as a brainteaser. The future will show if AI will be recognized as assistants to writers or not, or if they will replace human writers. For me, I don’t think so, but prove me wrong.