Paul Goble
Staunton, July 26 – As the Putin regime has increased censorship and confiscated an increasing number of books published in the West, some Russians are using artificial intelligence to translate such books into Russian and then disseminate them to those who want them as a kind of “pirated” editions and who do not have any other means of acquiring them.
This effort so far only a few groups of activists and a limited number of titles, Vladimir Kharitonov, the technical director of Freedom Letters, says; but it helps those who need access to books and journals like The Economist the Kremlin doesn’t want them to have (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/07/26/piratskoe-prosveshchenie).
He discusses in some detail one of these efforts, the Bookship project (t.me/bookship24), which emerged several years ago and has issued AI translations of 60 relatively new Western books and has so far operated below the radar screen of the Russian powers that be because its translations can be characterized as for personal use and thus do not violate copyright laws.
Kharitonov suggests that such efforts will only expand, although he concedes that the AI translations are not as good as those made by humans and that this effort may have its greatest impact by serving as a kind of advertisement for books that should be given human translations by regular publishers.
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