Test: Can You Tell an AI Voice from a Human One?
Six audio clips, each speaking a short phrase. Some were generated by AI, the others are real human voices. Can you tell them apart? Take part by August 15, 2025, and with six correct answers you enter the draw for a modest gift. Will you guess which voice belongs to a person and which to a machine? The gauntlet has been thrown!
02Quiz: Who Drew It—a Child or AI?
It’s time for an unexpected but important test: an experiment that raises big questions about the future of creativity, of what makes us human, and of education. Challenge yourself and your intuition with 15 pictures drawn by children aged 3 to 10 and 15 generated by artificial intelligence—tell them apart and you could win a prize! Responses are open until July 1, the survey takes no more than 10 minutes, you can answer just some of the questions, and children are welcome to take part too.
03Hedgehogs Are Born Without AI
What kind of world will today's children live in? What is worth learning today, and what would be a waste of time, effort and money? When and how should we introduce them to technology so that both sides get to know each other without anyone getting hurt? And when should we “introduce” them to artificial intelligence? I will look for the answers to these and other important questions about children and technology. A long series of children's Digital Stories begins. Here is why I believe it is vital to dig deeper into these enormous topics:
04AI Makes the Finals of a Second Poetry Competition (An Experiment)
Literary circles were rocked by the news that an unexpected contender had made the jury's shortlist in the prestigious Veselin Hanchev youth poetry competition: 21-year-old Hristian Papazov, from the village of Nozharevo near Silistra, had submitted poems generated by artificial intelligence. Hristian (or whoever stands behind that name) withdrew, writing that his only goal had been to draw attention to the issue. I don't know whether you believe in coincidences; I don't. On October 25, a day before the news broke, the jury of another popular poetry competition announced its ten finalists. And once again the selection included… generated poems. This time as part of a Digital Stories experiment. So how, in just two days, did two “authors” with AI-written poems end up among the best, the ones from whom the winners will be chosen? And, more importantly: what are the big questions and conclusions here? Whether or not we believe in coincidences, it is clearly time to talk more sensibly and more deeply about the big questions of our day. The Day of the Buditels, Bulgaria's November 1 holiday honoring the enlighteners of the National Revival, is, I think, exactly the right day to wake up…
05Digital Stories Wins a Prestigious Award… for Storytelling
For the fifth time, Digital Stories is among the big winners of Bulgaria’s most hotly contested and well-established journalism competition, the Web Report awards, organized for the seventh year running by the news portal Dir.bg. The honor means a great deal because of the respected jury and the stiff competition: 230 pieces of journalism were entered. Digital Stories has been among the winners every single year since the project began, and this year the award comes in the True Stories category for “Jesus: The Programmer Who Came Out of the Ghetto,” while a second piece, “How to Generate Yourself an Influencer,” was one of the three nominees in the Technology and Innovation category.
06How Did We Break the Conversation Online?
Never before have we been able to talk about the things that matter, hear the smartest people and debate them the way we can online today, and yet… we spend our time looking for something to fight about. Here is a small experiment, garnished with eight things to think about, that follows a single article about covid on its journey through social media. A reflection on where we have ended up.
07How to Generate Yourself an Influencer
How could you not like Elena Dimitrova, or simply EcoElena? Blonde, smiling, upbeat, she travels, lives in harmony with nature, hands out useful tips and offers exotic recipes. There is just one more detail: she doesn't exist, and in a month of posts in her name, 84,519 people saw her, nine proposed romance, and not one noticed that every letter and pixel was generated by AI.
08Isus: The Programmer Who Came Out of the Ghetto
“The hardest part was taking the essence of the two worlds I live in and combining them into one. It takes a lot of emotional energy and a great deal of empathy. I’ve been rejected by Bulgarians because I’m a Gypsy, and by Gypsies because I’m ‘pretending’ to be Bulgarian. You fight to be respected on opposite fronts.” It is my pleasure to introduce Isus Kostov! To his colleagues he is simply “Jesus,” and to me he is a powerful example of how a person can defeat his surroundings, prejudice, even himself, to reach what he dreams of, however distant, even impossible, it may seem. His road begins in a Roma ghetto, and today he is a software engineer at a respected company. He taught himself online and never gave up, starting from a school he often attended hungry, in shoes with no soles. By now he has built up serious experience in the profession. “The most valuable thing programming has given me is, without a doubt, freedom,” Isus says. “It gave me the chance to get out of the difficult situation I was in and to build a life in which I’m independent and can help my family.” His next goal is to inspire more kids to chase their dreams, and not to give up when they are held down by their surroundings and their circumstances. And what might happen if stories like this changed the attitude of both our society and the IT sector toward these children?
