site.btaNew Bulgarian University Rector: The Problem about Using AI in Literature and Art Has to Do with Ethics

The big problem about using artificial intelligence (AI) in literature and art has to do with ethics, the presence or absence of checks and balances, Sofia’s New Bulgarian University (NBU) Rector Plamen Doynov said in a BTA interview. The literary historian and poet was on the jury of the Veselin Hanchev National Youth Poetry Competition in Stara Zagora, where an AI-generated poem fell short of winning an encouragement award.

"There is no new issue about authorship. There is an old issue, which is related to the authors’ ethics,” Doynov said. He noted that a person can hire an author to write some work of literature for him, which he can then submit for a literary competition. For example, Romain Gary won the Goncourt Prize in France under a pseudonym.

“No one can prove who really wrote a work generated by AI. At present, there is no way to determine beyond doubt whether a literary work was written by AI or not,” the professor said.

He expects that AI use will become even less possible to detect in the near future as technology develops. It is becoming necessary to watch for other signs, which can be detected in live discussions with the people involved, he said.

As an example, Doynov cited a students’ literary competition in Shumen, where, in addition to submitting your work, you are required to be physically present in the town during the event, which is like a festival. You are supposed to participate in live readings and defend your submission in front of a live audience. “This raises a major barrier to authorship fraud, the replacement of the human author by AI,” the scholar said.

Earlier this year, NBU adopted new rules about AI, according to which anyone using such technology is required to declare it, including when they use it to process data, the rector said.

Nowadays, AI can create literature which is “just decent,” according to Doynov. This was the case with the much-discussed poem “Grandpa” in the Veselin Hanchev Competition, which almost won one of 10 encouragement awards. "The great danger is that AI can increase the share of works which are ‘just decent’,” the professor warned.

"As far as I know, even Stephen King has experimented with AI,” he said. That was a case of assigning a specific task, “asking” AI to write a short story or a novel in Stephen King’s style, which the computer did quite well. “I don’t know whether he published it,” Doynov noted. “In this case, however, it was a particular kind of training for AI by the author.”

“AI has very tangible presence in some art forms, and sometimes presents very serious competition to natural intelligence,” Doynov said, citing photography and design as examples. “We have not yet created robots that are sophisticated enough to create oil paintings, for example. Anyway, painting seems to be keeping AI at bay for now, but it is perhaps a matter of time.”

The benefits of employing AI in art and science can be considerable, more specifically, in humanitarian and literary research. According to the NBU chief, AI could be used in text analysis and data processing, not just processing statistical data and numbers but also words and texts. It can be used to restore works of art, too.

Caution should be exercised to prevent works created by AI from being declared as scientific contributions or artistic breakthroughs, the professor said. “This means that we need to do our job even better and to have criteria,” he argued.