Satori Reader Statement on Artificial Intelligence

Satori Reader is built by humans.

As AI-generated content becomes more and more prevalent online, you may wonder whether we use AI to generate the stories you see on Satori Reader.

The short answer is...

All of our content is written, edited, proofread, performed, recorded, annotated, proofread again, and supported entirely by our small team of dedicated human beings.

The long answer is...

We write all our content from scratch, or license it from other human beings.
Our main writers are Rika Nakajima and Hiroe Noma. When one writes, the other edits. Our lead annotator, Brian Rak, also makes an editing pass to control for difficulty and keep it learner-friendly.

We have also been very fortunate to work with content from Yuusuke Takemori of Yuyu No Nihongo Podcast and American science-fiction writer Ted Chiang.

We record real human beings for all of our audio performances.
We record at studios in Seattle and Tokyo. All of our talented voice actors, audio engineers, and sound designers are real, live human beings who care about bringing the storis to life.

We annotate and proofread all our content by hand.
Brian Rak and Kenny Lino carefully connect every word of the text to the appropriate dictionary entry (and sense within that entry!), write annotations to explain the tricky bits, create sentence translations that reflect the underlying Japanese structure as much as possible, and then perform multiple proofreading passes on the results of that effort. We're not perfect, and typos get through now and then, but they are 100% human typos.

We reply to each and every reader question personally.
Our team reads every single user question, discusses as necessary, and writes a reply that specifically answers the question the reader is asking—and sometimes also the question we think they might be asking at a deeper level. It takes a substantial effort each week to do this, and we think larger companies would consider it "unscalable," but we think the genuine human-to-human connection provides real value to the student.

Do we use / have we ever used / will we ever use AI for anything?
Yes. We are not only language people but also software people, and that means we try not to be Luddites. There is no doubt that AI is a useful technology, and like everyone these days, we've experimented to see if it could improve parts of our workflow.

• We experimented on one or two occasions with using AI to help generate artwork for fantastical scenes (notably in our "Short Stories: Autumn" series). However, based on user feedback and our own experience, we reverted to our traditional method of artwork creation (and re-created all the "Short Stories: Autumn" artwork in our traditional way).
• Sometimes we use AI as a third pair of eyes to sanity-check our work and make sure we haven't missed something obvious through sheer human fatigue.
• We think AI might be useful to improve our discussion search functionality.
• And perhaps AI will be useful in the future in some way we haven't yet thought of.

But there is one thing that we know for certain:

Language, communication, and teaching are human-to-human endeavors.
Effective communication means understanding the mind of the listener—what they know, what they expect, what they need to know.

Effective teaching means understanding the mind of the student—what they have learned so far, why something might seem confusing, what they need to hear to make things click.

Our mission is to teach Japanese in a warm, down-to-earth, and genuinely human way. Starting from our first ever product, Human Japanese, and throughout everything we do here at Satori Reader, we are, and always have been: by humans, for humans.

We deeply appreciate your support and we look forward to studying with you!