Stay Curious!
What is Yavorov's hometown? Svishtov. Artificial intelligence hallucinated that, and rather clumsily, you might guess. Except it wasn't the machine. It was me, taking part in a prime-time show on Bulgaria's oldest television channel. I would have thought I was more likely to get my own name wrong than the birthplace of a man whose story has fascinated me my whole life. Yet I got it wrong, and I won't be showing my face in Chirpan anytime soon. Knowledge is not a given. Curiosity doesn't come on its own; it takes effort. But is there any point in remembering where Yavorov was born in an age when we can check it in a fraction of a second? Would he have written different poems if he had been from Svishtov? Will the next generations know where he was born, how he wrote? What stirred him, where and how he met love? If you like, ask ChatGPT. Or the Constitutional Court. My own answer is this: today, more than ever, it matters that we stay curious!
02Poetry 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…
03“Today, Heroism Means Keeping Our Humanity Online”
We are supposedly celebrating heroism today, but what does it mean here and now, is there courage on social media, and is it worth honoring people who lived centuries ago? Mihail Kunchev founded Adopt a Hero to care for the graves of great Bulgarians of the past, and as he searches for their final resting places, he gathers their stories. We talk about heroism, why it matters to preserve the memory of the past, and how our future depends on it.
04“If It’s Beautiful, Does It Matter That AI Wrote It?”
Is there room for poetry in the age of TikTok and artificial intelligence? How do we return this art to the pedestal it deserves? Can today’s poets be influencers, and should they? Is the time when artificial intelligence can no longer be separated from poetry frightening, or a dream come true? Apollo ex machina is the name of Bulgaria’s first competition for poetry created with the help of artificial intelligence, and now is the moment to join in! The venture’s special name was coined by today’s guest. Besides sitting on the competition jury, he runs the publishing house Scribens, which will publish the best poems from it in a collection. Georgi Gavrilov is a poet and… a physicist. He founded Scribens to give young Bulgarian authors a chance to reach their readers.
