What Do Bulgarians Think About Artificial Intelligence? The Results
After a long stretch of collecting answers to the big Digital Stories survey, it's time to sum up the results! What do Bulgarians think about artificial intelligence? Are they impressed by its progress, do they use it every day, do they greet the next big steps with fear or enthusiasm, do they believe general AI is possible, and do they expect sweeping change in the years ahead? Time to find out through the impartial lens of the data!
62(In)Human Resources: A Referee Calls the Match Between AI and People
Can an algorithm land a job? A fake candidate dreamed up by ChatGPT made it to two job interviews, so I asked Petar Dzhuganski, a former assistant referee with more than 250 professional football matches behind him and now head of recruitment at a large software company, to analyze the match between AI and humans. Is the software industry still letting newcomers in, are professions disappearing because of AI, and should workers from distant countries frighten us?
63Bai Ganyo vs. ChatGPT: Will You Vote?
In a matter of days, Bulgaria holds its seventh parliamentary election in just three years, with turnout likely to sink below the records we keep breaking and even more parties likely to enter parliament. Where are the leaders, the ideas, the vision? Rather than ask the pundits, I hand the floor to two undisputed authorities: Bai Ganyo, the archetypal Bulgarian boor from Aleko Konstantinov's 1895 satire, and the newest version of ChatGPT.
64Did ChatGPT Land a Job as a Programmer?
Can ChatGPT manage to… land a job? Or at least make it to an interview, perhaps the hardest step when it comes to your first job? Instead of idle speculation, I'll test it in practice: the algorithm will write the résumé of a young programmer, and I'll send it to 10 entry-level job ads. Will recruiters invite him to an interview, grow suspicious, or simply ignore him?
65What Do You Think About Artificial Intelligence? Your Opinion Matters!
Your opinion matters! In recent years we have split into extremes and stereotypes in how we see technology, and artificial intelligence is becoming the leading topic that everyone has something to say about. What do you think—is artificial intelligence unjustified media hype, or the big factor that will change our future as a species? Will it open up incredible opportunities for people, or turn the world into a digital concentration camp? Now is the time to say what you think! I believe it is important to find out how as many people as possible feel about AI. I will be grateful if you answer 20 quick questions; it takes only 5 minutes. Heartfelt thanks for every response and every share!
66Where To Now, ChatGPT?
To be or not to be? Left or right? Life is a string of decisions, and on them hangs everything, from whether we reach the peaks we dream of to the eternal riddle of what to have for lunch. So we bring Hamlet and ChatGPT together to find the labyrinths, literal and figurative, that the electronic Virgil is ready to lead us through: five cases where artificial intelligence is already here to guide us, and five where we will have to wait (or never live to see it).
67Dartmouth: Pouring the Foundations of AI
“By 1978 at the latest, we will have a machine with general artificial intelligence comparable to average human intelligence,” says Marvin Minsky, one of the scientists who organized the Dartmouth meeting. It gave birth to fundamental ideas and raised questions that seem more important today than ever… ChatGPT was unveiled in November 2022. But when was artificial intelligence… “born”? The idea that computers can resemble humans and solve a wide range of problems. How many candles will it have to blow out on its next birthday—5, 10, 20? A full 68! Although by 1956 the forerunners of the field, Alan Turing and John von Neumann, had long since made their fundamental discoveries, it is ’56 that is now considered the starting year in the history of the field. For 8 weeks, the greatest scientists in this future field came and went at an American college. The people who would later lay the foundations of the field gathered to talk about the main challenges they faced…
68Poetry 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…
69Agent GPT: When Artificial Intelligences Start Playing as a Team
What if we turned the stereotype of artificial intelligence on its head? Instead of a single model we chat with, we face countless separate “individuals.” We hand them tasks, and each works autonomously, specializes in a particular job, accumulates knowledge about it, keeps an eye on the others… The goal might be, say, to build software. One model learns to formulate the requirements, another writes the code, a third prepares the visual side, a fourth tests what came out and how… and so an entire software company comes together, working millions of times faster than ordinary ones, because it is built not of people but of algorithms. How far off is that future today? Not long ago Sam Altman said that this is exactly the direction in which very serious breakthroughs are coming. AI agents are one of the fields of computer science where we expect big news. The next generations of artificial intelligence, able to solve far more complicated and complex tasks while making far fewer mistakes. Many of the leading experts say this is the approach by which we will take the next big step in the development of artificial intelligence. Here is why.
70“AI Can Already Help with Absolutely Any Human Task”
Nikolay Markov is among the specialists paving the way for artificial intelligence to enter every area of our lives. He has spent more than two decades in information technology, yet he trained in engineering physics and macroeconomics. His experience runs from building cloud solutions through cybersecurity to researching and deploying AI. Today he leads the AI, DevOps and cloud practice at SoftServe, and at TeamLandi he is building a system that will give small and medium-sized businesses access to the full range of what AI can do. Why are these technologies here to stay and change our lives? How is AI the first technology that can reach into absolutely every field? What will the future look like?
71How Would ChatGPT Do on Bulgaria's School-Leaving Exam?
The world may talk endlessly about the Turing test, but Bulgaria has its own equivalent that is just as telling: the matura, the school-leaving exam in Bulgarian language and literature. I gave ChatGPT this year's exam with no extra instructions, sat it myself as a rival, and handed both papers to a real examiner, who graded them and tried to guess which one was written by the algorithm and which by an overage school-leaver. Which of us embarrassed himself more? Grab the popcorn.
72Apply AI or Die?
Apply AI or Die? Dr. Artur Kordon, a native of Varna who has spent 32 years in the United States bringing artificial intelligence into industry, 18 of them as a research leader at Dow Chemical, believes this is the great question of our time. He explains why ChatGPT is only one step in a revolution that will “sweep everything away,” and why today's systems are not a black box but a black hole that could destroy us all if we follow the path charted by Sam Altman and OpenAI.
73Roko's Basilisk: What If “It” Reads What We Say About It?
We live our quiet lives, amused by artificial intelligence's banal blunders and mocking its creators. Meanwhile it keeps getting better, until one day it learns to make decisions, starts watching the internet and meddling here and there, gently at first, then more boldly… Roko's Basilisk is the idea that AI will grow into something capable of making decisions, then dig through the internet to find out who said what about it, make sure it is shown in the best light, and quietly start causing trouble for the people who get in its way. Are you sure this thought experiment isn't worth keeping in mind?
74Rakia-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?
75“AI Is Arriving on a Massive Scale, Turbulently and a Little Chaotically”
Bulgaria will soon host the first International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence, bringing talented young people from at least 30 countries to Burgas. Elena Marinova, co-founder and longtime president of Musala Soft and co-founder of the olympiad, explains how the idea was born here. She also discusses what AI promises to change and why we urgently need a public conversation about it.
76“Truly Intelligent AI? Only If We Take the Next Big Step”
Viktor Botev and his team are building a successful product in one of the most high-tech fields of artificial intelligence, yet his enthusiasm for the near future in which AI will change us all is far from the sweeping expectations of the day. For eight years he has been chief technology officer of Iris.ai, a Norwegian-Bulgarian startup that applies AI to vast bodies of scientific data. A long, human conversation about technology for connoisseurs: hallucinations, the limits of large language models, and why the era of Bulgaria's outsourcing companies is over.
77Elections + Artificial Intelligence: The Perfect Storm
This year nearly two-thirds of the planet will vote, one way or another, for those who will govern them, and for the first time it is happening in the age after ChatGPT. Can artificial intelligence become the deciding factor, can we avoid being manipulated, and could technology one day change how our societies are run? Here are eight reasons to stop and think.
78“AI Has Already Changed the Translator’s Job”
Did you know that automated translation systems are at work all around us? That a huge share of administrative and commercial texts are translated into every language by artificial intelligence, and the job of humans is to check and correct them? They are no longer even called “translators” but “post-editors.” Rada Gankova returns to talk about her main work, translation, and how artificial intelligence is changing it.
79How DALL·E “Read” Beloved Bulgarian Books
The Chukchi is no reader, he’s a writer, as the old Soviet joke goes. But what about ChatGPT? Time for another fascinating experiment to show what today’s algorithms can do, both at creating images and at understanding context. I will ask DALL·E 3, part of the paid version of ChatGPT, to illustrate classic works of Bulgarian literature from different periods. Why is this interesting? It will show how well the large language model works in Bulgarian and how far it recognizes some of our undisputed classics. And, not least, because… might it show us some unexpected, different, striking points of view? Could we speak of some form of collective unconscious? Will the pictures overlap, at least in part, with the images each of us carries in our head for these books?
80“I Imagine the Future as a Battle for the Invisible”
“For now, artificial intelligence strikes us as funny. It looks like a funhouse mirror, or a little dimwit we guide along, one who makes us feel knowledgeable and more human than ever. But this is changing literally by the day, and soon it will become a realistic and credible reflection of us. I think about that moment—perhaps then we will manage to see ourselves through its eyes, to grasp which parts of us are clear even to an artificial creature, what remains out of its reach, and what is most precious. To me, those are the places it cannot peer into. I imagine the future as a battle for the invisible; that will be the most important resource. What artificial intelligence cannot register is the most precious thing in us.” Pochti vsichko e nared (Almost Everything Is Fine) is the title of poet Violeta Kuneva’s debut collection, and it captures with such precision how the world feels to us today. But how did it come to this, that we can no longer tell the poet from the algorithm? What do we lose if that is so? Is the problem that, en masse, we have lost our yardstick for art, for metaphor, for layered, living texts that are human by definition, as poems are? Will poetry come to an end, or… is it precisely poetry that can save us from ourselves?
