Would you keep reading an AI-translated novel?

I'd rather hear which passage made someone want to turn the page than whether they spotted an ‘AI tell’. Those are different reading skills. In an October 2026 study, 15 avid readers compared human and AI translations of excerpts from 15 recent French, Polish and Japanese novels into English. They chose the human translation to continue reading in 19 of 30 excerpt comparisons, but correctly identified which was which in only 17 of 30. The whole-excerpt preference was descriptive, not statistically significant; the stronger preference emerged in close, passage-by-passage reading. This is a small study of one AI translation pipeline, not a verdict on every translated book. The readers sometimes enjoyed the machine version. They also tended to prefer whichever version they believed was human. That association doesn't tell us whether the belief shaped the preference or the preference shaped the guess. For a book discussion, I'd ask ‘Where did you stop noticing the wording and get caught up in the scene?’ before asking who translated it. Credits and consent still matter. But I'd like to leave room for someone to enjoy a passage without being told they failed a detection test.