The time has come to announce the winners of Bulgaria's first (and one of the world's first) competition for poetry created with the help of artificial intelligence—Apollo ex Machina.

The jury's picks were revealed at a ceremony in the Sofia City Library. The anthology of selected entries from the competition, published by Scribens, was presented there as well. In a moment you can read the poems of the best and judge for yourself how good they are.

The competition drew 248 works by 115 authors. They had complete freedom in how to use the modern technology—whether to trust it entirely or to cast it as co-author, adviser or editor. Well-known poets took part, along with tech leaders and public figures. Many colorful people dared to try and to show whether today we can use algorithms not to replace humans but to help them. Whether they can turn a non-poet into a poet, and let a poet take flight toward new horizons.

The jury included popular poets from different generations—Boyko Lambovski, Petar Chuhov, Violeta Kuneva and Georgi Gavrilov—and the creator of Digital Stories, Georgi Karamanev.

Erato AI

The grand winner chosen by the jury is Kristina Apostolova! She received the prize of 200 leva (about $115) and the honors of winning the first poetry competition of its kind in Bulgaria. The runners-up, Tsvetelina Manova and Ivelina Andonova, earned gifts—books from Scribens and Digital Stories.

The poems of the top 10, along with those of 17 more participants, are included in the long-awaited anthology of the winners. It was also presented at the award ceremony (you can browse and order it here).

Did it work? You can judge for yourself. In a moment you'll read one poem by each of the three winners. (If you're in a hurry, they're waiting for you here.) The other honorees you'll find in the anthology, which bears the competition's name—Apollo ex Machina.

And to make the balance complete…, we also “appointed” a separate, electronic “jury.” We invited three of the most current AI models to draw up their own ranking, which, surprisingly or not,… turned out to be connected to the poets' ranking.

Braveheart

My heartfelt thanks to each of the 115 participants! With their words they are taking the next step in the important conversation about our future. The one that never seems to happen outside the pages of Digital Stories.

Besides the three winners, the anthology includes those ranked from 4th to 10th place:

Andzhela Genova, Ralitsa Arnaudova, Yana Kopcheva, Emilia Bobeva, Iren Petrova, Ivan Dimitrov and Andrey Tenov.

From the colorful palette of participants, we also chose to include in the collection the poems sent by:

Katsi Vaptsarov, Svetoslav Dragiev, Nikolay Tellalov, Krasimir Kostadinov, Nikolay Kostov, Rozalia Ignatova, Viliana Staneva, Atanas Atanasov, Lora Braneva, Ivandzhelin Marinova, Zhivka Petrova, Kaliakra Lazarova, Sesil Kostadinova, Stoyan Zapryanov, Ivan Kirmin, Bozhidar Pangelov, Elko Chernev, Maria Chulova, Tanya Marinova, Yulia Kamenova, Tihomir Garmenliev, Milva Yaneva, Boyan Sheytanov, Lyudmila Koroteeva, Vesela Boyadzhieva, Rositsa Georgieva and Neda Atanasova.

Nothing Beats the First

And so, here are the winners' poems. One work by each follows; the rest, together with those of the runners-up, you'll find in the anthology.

The participants were invited to tell us which AI model they used and to share the prompt with which the poems were written. To show or tell us how they were created. We are publishing these instructions (or prompts) too, so we can look at how human and machine interacted in the act of creation.

First Place: Kristina Apostolova

“A Silence the Size of a Mushroom”

Almost home,
and under my heels the earth
still curls up
like an animal.

The night is a skin
into which I exhale the names of the dead
without giving them back.

Everyone around seems to be asleep.
Only a violin breathes
beneath the tongue of the wind.
It doesn't play for me,
but inside my ribs
the sound creeps in
and breaks the silence in two.

Then, at three in the morning,
the night beneath my window
is deaf,
worn thin from listening.

Sometimes,
as I listen to my children breathing,
absurd fears seize me—
that somewhere beyond the hills
someone is piling darkness into sacks—
like flour,
like gunpowder.
The world learned long ago
how war is kneaded.

My footprints gather dust,
the finest news of ruin.
Not far from our bedroom there are cities
where the wind carries names
and skin.

I hope it doesn't all end like this one day:
the silence bursting
like a giant mushroom
above our heads.

I hope, some distant day,
when everything ends,
it ends only for me.

Prompt:

The style, tone and imagery were inspired by the work of T. S. Eliot, Federico García Lorca, the Bulgarian writers Viktor Paskov, Binyo Ivanov and Boris Hristov, Dylan Thomas, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou and others. The author gave specific instructions about themes, metaphors and style, and the texts generated by the model were edited and adapted to fit the artistic vision.

Second Place: Tsvetelina Manova

Oracle, Tell Me, What Shall It Be

Oracle, You Are Silent…

The servers in Delphi have gone dark: at the market
Pythia sells her plum for garbage.
Apollo, influencer of eternity,
livestreams on TikTok, with a feather
up his backside and a little Gucci bag.

Algorithms prophesy in rhyme,
the ads broadcast revelations,
from the television anxious angels
whisper through the microphones:
« System error : Apocalypse detected. »

It's the Apocalypse, but who cares,
as long as you and I race
against time: code to code, flesh
to flesh, dust to our dust.

You are God-anointed once you dip your finger
into the jam of knowledge, God-convenient
once you make love to the machine
and give birth to synthetic gods.

Oedipus gouges out his eyes
with a dying cry : « CTRL + ALT + DEL ! »,
but you, Oracle, are silent…

For it is sacrilege
to be the Crown of creation
when your Creator is software.

Prompt:

ChatGPT, I want us to play le Cadavre exquis, like the surrealist poets. You won't write alone, and you won't let me write alone either. I want us to write 3 poems together in Bulgarian, with a modern structure and rhythm, but with slightly provocative content, a mystical-esoteric sound and references to the Bible and ancient Greek mythology. Our poems will be inspired by the following phrase : « I sentence you to the most terrible punishment: to be given all the answers. But not to remember what the Question is. »

Third Place: Ivelina Andonova

Archaeology of Sleep

In my sleep I dig.
With my hands. Without a lamp.

From under the earth I pull out things:
a stone, a feather, a broken mirror.
Each of them whispers to me
in a forgotten language.

At last I find myself—
small, made of clay.
I put the figurine in my pocket,
and wake up.

All day I carry its weight.
It reminds me
that the past is not dug up—
it is grown

Prompt:

It's not just one prompt.

Parting Words

I often hear the opinion that AI has no place in art and poetry. But at a time when two professional juries not only fail to tell generated poems apart but actually give them awards, we can't carry on with bans, restrictions and prejudices. Yes, the future is already here.

It's high time we talked about it together!

What's more, I believe—especially after reading the poems in the competition—that technology can be a helper that returns poetry and art to the pedestal they deserve. That raises the bar instead of lowering it. That makes us capable of things we never even dreamed of. That helps revive our reverence for human creativity and the inner need to create.

For that to happen, though, we need the courage to start the conversation. My heartfelt thanks to each of the 115 participants, because with their words they take one more step toward it.

Let's take the next one together.

You'll find the anthology here.

What did you think of the poems from Apollo ex Machina? Do human and algorithm create good poetry together?

Write to me at me@karamanev.me.

The conversation continues!

“I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my hands…” Blue Scuti mutters, before he realizes he has fulfilled a dream that seemed impossible. Almost four decades on, he has beaten, one way or another, the game we have all played.

Sitting in front of a retro cathode-ray-tube TV, found after countless difficulties, clicking the buttons of a retro controller for 42 minutes straight at more than 20 taps per second… the teenager reminded us that there is no limit to what a human can do.

But how can you beat a game that has no end? And why are this success and the road to it such important news for humans as a species? News about our ability, through cooperation and talent, to keep moving forward… To create, to make things, to find meaning. To give birth to stories.

Tetris is a legend that passes through the generations to give birth to new legends. A week ago we took a stroll through the history of the game that came out of a Soviet laboratory during the Cold War. Today we will look at a brand-new record that has so much to tell us about ourselves.

Oh, the Games We Had Back Then…

Among the thousands of versions of Tetris, perhaps the most popular is the one for the Nintendo console. And even though this is technology that looks ancient today—you can only run it in its classic form on an analog TV—the cult around it has not faded in recent years; it has grown. Ever more fiercely contested tournaments are held around the world.

The players have become astonishing virtuosos. In the classic versions of Tetris, a player cannot beat the game—there is always another level, and another… So how did an American teenager manage to beat it?

The story is full of technical details, but in short: the classic Nintendo Tetris was built to squeeze everything out of the hardware of those prehistoric computer days, when even megabytes were a mirage.

Rolling with a Flourish

In principle, the game speeds up and gets harder until level 19; after that it keeps generating new levels, but only by cycling the colors of the pieces. So over the past decade players have been racing to set records. The speed is truly astonishing—the movements on the screen can barely be followed by eye, and the same goes for the fingers on the controller. Players think many moves ahead, and they also need a certain dose of luck.

For quite a long time it was believed that the record had hit its ceiling. Players stalled around level 50, where the algorithm starts generating pieces in colors that are almost indistinguishable from the background—the developers simply never expected anyone to get that far. These levels are known as “the coal.”

Then the limit became physical: after the 20th minute, players’ fingers simply give out, and that slowed progress once again…

In 2021, however, the new record holder came up with a completely different technique—“rolling”—which everyone uses today. Instead of just pressing the controller’s buttons with his thumbs, he simultaneously pushes the controller up against them with his index fingers, gaining those vital fractions of a second. And so the record kept climbing.

Game Over

And so a new big goal appeared. Programmers trained an artificial intelligence to play this version of the game, and it began reaching unthinkably high levels, until at some point… the game stops. Because of the limited memory and the choices made by the original programmers, those unthinkably high levels contain points that, under very specific circumstances, bring the game to an end. Or, more precisely, freeze the screen.

It was in 2021 that our friend Blue Scuti also began playing competitively. Only 11 at the time, he won tournaments and quickly settled in among the elite players chasing the unthinkable goal: to beat the legendary Tetris.

That is exactly what happened in the first days of 2024. Scuti missed his first chance, then everything seemed irretrievably lost, until… two levels later, he couldn’t believe what he had achieved. After 39 years, Tetris had been beaten one way or another (or at least outsmarted), Scuti became a celebrity, and players began wondering what the next big goals might be.

Play the video

An interesting video (in English) about the technology and the history of the record, and about the next feats in the game that players might chase.

The NeverEnding Story

Here’s an idea. Back in 1992, the mathematician John Brzustowski pondered whether a person could play Tetris forever. He concluded that the game is statistically doomed to end. If a player gets a long enough run of alternating S- and Z-shaped pieces, at some point it will make him lose. But how long would you have to play for statistics like that to catch up with you? And developers could rule it out anyway with a slightly improved algorithm.

“What is a final victory in the game?” Pajitnov asks rhetorically. “Grasp the horror of those words.”

The boy’s real name is Willis Gibson. “Scuti” comes from Scutum, the Latin name of the constellation of the Shield, and in slang it means something big, exceptional.

Scuti plays about 20 hours a week. His family approves of the hobby; they even went to considerable lengths to get him the old-fashioned TV he needed. He reached level 157, a practically inhuman performance in a game designed to go up to level 29!

He now holds the records for the longest game, the highest score, the highest level…

Four Weddings and a Funeral

The fate of this game seems somehow bound up with tragedy. Scuti dedicated the record to his father, who died a month before the kid became world-famous.

Pajitnov also said he was very impressed by the kid’s success, but he made a point of noting that it was not his game that had been beaten, but simply its implementation for the Nintendo console.

Formally, he is entirely right. But something else matters more.

For a quarter of a century now, algorithms have been stronger than us at chess… and so what? Tournaments are more appealing than ever, players keep finding unconventional moves, memorable competitors and fascinating personalities keep emerging. They even give us reasons for national pride, as Bulgaria’s women chess players have done in recent months.

The algorithm long ago beat us at Go too, a game that gave it trouble for a long time (it was a game of Go, by the way, that brought our hero Pajitnov and the Japanese together). Yet today Go is more popular than ever, and stronger players keep appearing…

In times when technology is ready to beat us at more and more games, it turns out that we humans are getting better too. That we manage to find new forms, new directions in which the machine still can’t catch us. Might the same happen in almost every field? Might the progress of artificial intelligence create new forms and help us rediscover art?

Homo Ludens

“The way this 13-year-old achieved his dizzying feat tells us a lot about how the limits of human achievement are changing in the digital age,” writes the cognitive science professor Tom Stafford. And further:

“The achievement is real, but its significance reaches far beyond the world of classic arcade games and those who love them. What Gibson did, and how he did it, offers general lessons about how people learn and how the frontiers of human achievement expand. Gibson didn’t just pick up an old console; he joined a living tradition. There are thousands of players devoted to Tetris on the NES—the platform on which the game was first released in North America.

Much of the discussion around artificial intelligence focuses on the areas where human skills may become obsolete, but it is a mistake to treat human performance as a fixed target. As Gibson’s record-breaking feat showed, we are constantly looking to the outer limits and, in reaching them, extending our grasp.

The lesson is that pushing past the limits of human skill is the result of continuous collective innovation, as well as of remarkable individuals. Humans are a species defined by our capacity to learn, and in the digital age there are more and more opportunities to venture into unexplored territories of performance in every aspect of art, science and culture—including Tetris.”

The Sport for a Peaceful World

“I invented Tetris for my own pleasure. That’s the only way anything can be invented,” Pajitnov smiles.

Recently, in an interview about the big questions of 2024, the futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova told me about her meeting with the cosmonauts who returned to Earth a few months ago. She was surprised that instead of technology, they talked about the human side of things, about our future together as a species.

“They wanted to show that when humanity faces a truly important global question that concerns everyone—in this case, the success of that space mission—geopolitical and strategic stories don’t matter at all. Both the Russians and the Americans said: we want to offer humanity the formula for understanding, a model for success, for cooperation. Up there we depend on each other and we really are like brothers.”

Isn’t Tetris a wonderful metaphor for what can unite us? It set out from a country that no longer exists, headed east, and through the East conquered the West… To remind us that we are capable of the next big steps. That we can grow, dream, and as a species use technology fully and consciously. But that is only possible when we are together.