How 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.”
02Look at That! When Seeing Becomes an Art
Seeing and recognizing are no longer an objective skill or a science. Neither technology nor people can prove to us, with enough certainty to matter, which work is human and which is not. So isn't it time we started treating looking, the search for truth and fact-checking… as an art?
03Will There Be a Bulgarian Author? Book Picks from IT Leaders, Part III
Would you have guessed that Bulgarian IT leaders read Harry Potter, or even Dostoevsky? I wouldn't have, at least until a week ago, when I asked them and it turned out they do. On the eve of the Day of the Buditeli, I invited 30 remarkable people to recommend three favorite books to the readers of Digital Stories, and today I present the second half of their answers.
04“No, Now Is Not the Time for Poetry!”
What is poetry written with the help of artificial intelligence? Does AI write it alone, does it depend on the task the human sets, or can the two find a way to create something different together?
05Living Your Imagination
You can hardly have missed this modern debate, and you probably have your own opinion on it: now that artificial intelligence produces results indistinguishable from human creativity, will we go on creating? Is the great hero of our day taking over the human role of author, or is it just another link in history's long chain, the new tool that will give birth to the next arts, genres and forms? Welcome to the world of David Szauder. For the Hungarian multimedia artist, reality is only a starting point—life unfolds in the boundless space of the imagination, where technology is the artist's new brush and the absurd and the beautiful meet and complete each other.
06“Today We Can Be Anything, Yet We Choose to Be the Same”
Why does it matter so much whether we can tell children's drawings from AI-generated images? What does the future of creativity, of art, of the human being look like at a time when algorithms turn out to be indistinguishable from us as authors, and even better ones? What is worth teaching our children today? Can you tell 15 children's drawings from 15 images generated by artificial intelligence? In just a few days, the Digital Stories challenge for children and parents has prompted more than 2,500 people to test their intuition! The results of the test are shaping up to be extremely interesting, and we will talk about them once it closes on July 1. The experiment was created together with today's guest, Elitsa Staneva-Britton. A psychologist, journalist and teacher, she is currently working on her doctoral dissertation at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and her subject is creativity in the age of artificial intelligence. The time has come to talk about each of these topics.
07“A Truly Free Person Wouldn't Think of Their Phone as Anything Special”
Today's guest needs no introduction—his first name alone is enough to turn heads. Kitodar Todorov is a popular actor and television host, but also a meme hero and a seasoned gamer who invites guests to play online while they talk about life. Will this be a fun conversation, or will it give us reasons to stop and think about our place in the world of technology, gaming as a way of life, the difficult balance and the big questions? “Our entire modern civilization is built on little machines we depend on, and that's really dumb.” An unexpected conversation awaits!
08“I Can’t Wait for AI to Keep Getting Better!”
Artificial intelligence is throwing down the gauntlet to artists in more and more fields. While many believe the technology is far from creating better than humans, more and more often, and more abruptly, the opposite turns out to be true. So where do creativity, art and imagination go from here? How do we value the journey when the result comes easy? We live in a surprising world where you have to adapt to survive. Lubomir Sergeev is a photographer, digital artist, director and producer with 30 years of experience in advertising. He has worked on five continents and has lived in London and New York. He holds a long list of awards, among them the Victoria, considered the most prestigious in the world of photography. For 12 years in a row he has been included in the global selection of the “200 Best Digital Artists.”
09“A Machine Cannot Be a Poet”
Can a machine learn to write like Pushkin? Or is it leading us into Orwell’s world? This text was published in the September issue of LIK magazine in… 1967! Yet, as you will see, many of its ideas sound as if they came from the future. “The writer-machine? It keeps in its memory a vast store of words and has perfect command of every subtlety of grammar and style; it knows all the organs of sensation and all the ways of writing that writers have developed over the last 3,000 years. This ‘writer’ observes, memorizes phenomena, reasons, processes the data reality gives it. In the end it writes books, and we, reading them, are thrilled, but… we remain cold.” Is Dmitry Zhukov, the author of these lines, right? There is no way to ask him. But, as you will see, his point of view has a lot to say about our own day too. In search of answers to the big questions that move us—about technology and humanity, about poetry and creativity, about “automatons” and true creators…
10“Poetry Remains a Secret Treasure”: “Hristian Papazov” Gives His First Interview
The man who was the first in Bulgaria to place AI-generated verse among the best in a poetry competition gives his first (and perhaps only) interview ever, to Digital Stories. The questions come from… the second person to confirm the striking experiment. Who is behind the name Hristian Papazov, and why does he hope that we humans, not the algorithms, will soon be writing far better, more original and meaningful poems?
11Poetry 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…
12Rakia-Flavored Chips: An Optimistic Theory of AI and Art
Have you ever seen chips that taste like tripe soup or rakia? Or a Lego set that builds the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral or an old Zhiguli? Can you picture Bulgarian celebrities in Mortal Kombat—Sancho the Sandman versus Danov, and Khan Kubrat versus Gala? Well, no need to stretch your imagination: all of these ideas come to life thanks to the impressive collaboration between today's guest and the algorithms. Rosen Dukov is a graphic designer with a remarkable track record. He has created the posters for some of the most popular Bulgarian films of recent years and designed covers for books that sit in every self-respecting library. He has won international Photoshop competitions several times, and it is no exaggeration to call him a world champion. In recent years he has been teaching these skills at SoftUni—design, photo editing and artificial intelligence. Why isn't a visual artist afraid of competing with artificial intelligence? Why does he think it is important to get to know the new possibilities algorithms give us as soon as possible? What are the next original ideas he will use to show us how far generative models have come?
13“The World Reeks of Kitsch. That’s Why It’s Heading for Catastrophe”
“People still have 10,000 ways to think and to look at the world. And what do they do, damn it? They stare at their phones. The children growing up now have never seen what’s around them. They are the subject of science fiction, living in a parallel world. They don’t know what the streets look like, what people look like. It makes me think there’s no hope. Who will bring them into this world? If it happens by chance, they’ll be shattered.” Tekla Aleksieva became a legendary illustrator after creating 120 covers for the Galaktika Library, Bulgaria’s cult science fiction series. Generations of readers link the greatest science fiction novels with the images she painted. Besides being an artist with a singular eye and countless accolades, she is also the author of a poetry collection. What does she think of images generated by artificial intelligence? Why does she believe we are surrounded by kitsch on every side—in literature, in art, in life? Can we get our good taste back, and how? Why must we never, under any circumstances, leave the Earth? And how is it that... Tekla Aleksieva never managed to finish the book behind one of her most famous covers?
14Can Algorithms Make Art? 15 Viewpoints That Matter
Can algorithms create? Is artificial intelligence a tool or an author? Could AI give birth to the arts of the future, or has creating already become a pointless pursuit? What will we do when its works in every field become indistinguishable from ours? For three years now, I have been collecting viewpoints on this site about the big questions of today's technological day. I believe it is vital to bring more and different voices into the discussions on important topics, and art and creativity is unquestionably one of them. Here are 15 of the most interesting and substantial opinions I have gathered in that time. Do the words of tech people, writers, artists, clergymen and… tomcats contradict each other, or do they complement one another?
15A Dome You'd Want to Move Into…
Look at them: so real… and at the same time so fantastical. You feel like diving into the world of the Dome, which both resembles ours and is completely different. Better or worse?
16“AI Is a Crude Jolt That Will Wake Humanity Up”
How is technology about to settle the eternal battle between dictatorship and freedom? Why might the great technological threat to humanity actually come from the East? And this backed by the serious arguments of a man who knows China and its peculiarities up close. Technology specialists, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and even clergymen have shared their views on technological change with Digital Stories. Now the time has come for a fascinating meeting with a special guest from the world of design. Svilen Gamolov is a world-renowned product and interior designer who has worked for more than 23 years in Bulgaria, Cyprus and China. In 2018 he made the top 100 of the Design Intelligence Award world design ranking in Hangzhou, China. That same year, in Como, Italy, he won a platinum design award in a competition with 45,906 projects from around the world. He is working to turn Varna into a meeting place for design in Bulgaria and the world through Design Hub Varna. He runs Gamolov Design Studio. What will the homes of the future look like? Why will the real estate market change from the ground up in just a few years? Should humans give up competing with the machine and learn to offer an alternative instead? Why is technology here to wake us from decades of complacent stagnation?
17AI Built a Cell: How an Algorithm Painted Beloved Bulgarian Songs
Artificial intelligence now creates images hard to tell apart from photographs, and that can even change history—but has it learned to “paint” originally, impressively and without obvious blunders, even when the description is abstract, poetic and laden with meaning? Let’s reflect on that with a short but instructive experiment: how will ChatGPT cope with illustrating the lyrics of beloved Bulgarian songs? I pick 16 Bulgarian poetic works from different eras and genres completely at random, some of the most recognizable verses ever to become melodies, and see how the algorithm draws them.
18Tsvetomil and the Algorithm: Poems Come to Life
Can poems be painted? Are humans and algorithms rivals in this task, or is it time they joined forces to create the next forms of art? Open your senses to an emotional experience in which human and computer, side by side, challenge both your senses and your feelings…
1910 Magical Stories from Planet Earth
10 questions, 10 answers, 10 stories and 10 incredible photos. We fasten our seatbelts and set off on a thrilling journey to every corner of the planet… Dimitar Karanikolov is an architect who caught the photography bug almost by accident. He then became an undisputed master of the lens—his images have been shown by the world’s biggest media outlets, and he has won prestigious awards. He is the author of the unusual book Istorii ot planetata Zemya (Stories from Planet Earth), a photo journal in which, over 208 pages, striking photographs are accompanied by stories in Bulgarian and English and by pieces from guest authors such as Georgi Milkov. His favorite vantage point is high above. Why? That is what we are about to find out, along with who is the most fascinating character he has met on the road. Where did he feel in danger? What place (on Earth or not) does the architect-photographer dream of capturing through his lens? And why is it sometimes worth… losing your camera.
20Hollywood vs. Artificial Intelligence
160,000 people rose up in an unprecedented protest against artificial intelligence, which could take the bread out of every one of their mouths. No, they are not factory workers or taxi drivers, but Hollywood actors, many of them known all over the world and holders of prestigious awards, joined by the screenwriters. Why did technology spark the biggest revolt in Hollywood's history, and is it time we all learned something from the stars' protest?
