Waiting for Godot: writers and artificial intelligence. Threat or opportunity?
Deсember 8, 2024
A discussion session on a new literary reality took place in Moscow Gostiny Dvor
Artificial intelligence – a friend or a rival? A mere tool or a cultural phenomenon? Will it have a long-lasting impact on the future of literature, or has AI already peaked? These were the questions discussed by participants of the AWPUR International Literary Forum. The roundtable was moderated by writer Ragim Dzhafarov.
Bulgarian writer Boiko Lambovski is adamant that “the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” No great author has ever written anything in the days of plenty, feeling no spiritual hunger.
“A machine will never be able to appropriate the changing states of human mind,” he said. “Dostoevsky’s Gambler has an insatiable hunger for ‘the fearful pleasure of success,’ but what he really dreams of is to go broke, to heal through pain. And neural networks feel no pain. It’s not impossible, of course, that eventually they will learn to simulate genuine emotions, and we, in turn, will have to simulate the lack of them, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
Belarusian writer Elena Stelmakh believes that AI can serve as a focus group, helping authors gain an outside perspective, giving them something to think about, but no AI-generated text can compare to a book written by a human being. A book filled with the voices of past generations, and the scents and sounds of one’s home ground.
The hype surrounding AI has been generated by aggressive marketing, said Elena Kolmanovskaya, co-founder and former chief editor at Yandex: “At the dawn of the Internet, for example, things that had an “i” as their prefix cost ten times more than others.”
Kolmanovskaya admitted that while a machine able to “give a hand to people who do intellectual work” is no disaster, this union brings about a number of sad paradoxes: “The science fiction writers of the past were wrong. They thought robots would first take over all the mundane tasks and afterwards, when they become intelligent, start to compete with us in science and art. However, there’s still no sign of them replacing janitors. A robot vacuum cleaner can hardly memorize a room’s layout, and each step is still an insurmountable obstacle for it.”
Bulgarian writer Boiko Lambovski is adamant that “the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” No great author has ever written anything in the days of plenty, feeling no spiritual hunger.
“A machine will never be able to appropriate the changing states of human mind,” he said. “Dostoevsky’s Gambler has an insatiable hunger for ‘the fearful pleasure of success,’ but what he really dreams of is to go broke, to heal through pain. And neural networks feel no pain. It’s not impossible, of course, that eventually they will learn to simulate genuine emotions, and we, in turn, will have to simulate the lack of them, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
Belarusian writer Elena Stelmakh believes that AI can serve as a focus group, helping authors gain an outside perspective, giving them something to think about, but no AI-generated text can compare to a book written by a human being. A book filled with the voices of past generations, and the scents and sounds of one’s home ground.
The hype surrounding AI has been generated by aggressive marketing, said Elena Kolmanovskaya, co-founder and former chief editor at Yandex: “At the dawn of the Internet, for example, things that had an “i” as their prefix cost ten times more than others.”
Kolmanovskaya admitted that while a machine able to “give a hand to people who do intellectual work” is no disaster, this union brings about a number of sad paradoxes: “The science fiction writers of the past were wrong. They thought robots would first take over all the mundane tasks and afterwards, when they become intelligent, start to compete with us in science and art. However, there’s still no sign of them replacing janitors. A robot vacuum cleaner can hardly memorize a room’s layout, and each step is still an insurmountable obstacle for it.”