“Sometimes I’ll Come…”: How AI Illustrated 10 Classic Bulgarian Verses
What illustrations could artificial intelligence draw from the works of Botev, Debelyanov, Boris Hristov and Georgi Gospodinov, and how would image-generating algorithms interpret classic lines of Bulgarian literature? This kind of AI has been a hit in recent months, a striking example of what technology can already do, and it has given rise to a new skill: describing an image so precisely that the algorithm generates exactly what you expect. So what happens when we “feed” it the stanzas of proven masters? Here are the fascinating results!
02How AI Painted 10 Classic Bulgarian Verses: 2022 vs. 2026
In 2022, I called on MidJourney, the first truly impressive AI image model, to carry out an unexpected task. I fed it 10 quotes from beloved Bulgarian poets to see what it would draw. The results were striking and thought-provoking, and it became one of the most read and discussed Digital Stories. Almost a whole five-year plan has gone by since then. What will the pictures drawn from the very same verses by today's most advanced models look like? AI will undoubtedly show more skill, but will it also show creativity, understanding? Will its illustrations come closer to art? Judge for yourselves… “Never in my life had I dared to hope for a compliment quite so kind: AI invited me—the newest AI—to its home for a glass of absinthe.”
03Poetry Comes Alive: What Videos Did AI Make from Classic Bulgarian Verse?
How close are we to models that generate video indistinguishable from human work? Let's find out together with one important experiment. Generative models are evolving at astonishing speed. Two years ago I ran the same test with images: I fed Midjourney classic Bulgarian poems to see how well it would cope. Would it catch the message? Would it create worthy images? Gradually the algorithms grew better and better at the task, so much so that today we can no longer tell the created images from the generated ones. But what about video? What kind of clips might artificial intelligence create from a selection of classic poems? I chose two platforms that take quite different approaches to generation. And the results, to me at least, are definitely impressive…
04Christopher Buxton: All Is Love
His first memory is of boundless darkness; the morning greets him with the smell of roasting peppers. Before long he will fall in love with the country he has landed in, and then truly and forever with the woman of his life, and a magical story will be born between cultures and eras. He taught Petya Dubarova, was the first to translate many Bulgarian classics into English, and dared to take on even the maddeningly untranslatable novel Summit—and he still translates Bulgarian poetry, votes in our elections and gets worked up by our passions, because reason ends where true love begins…
