According to the Interfax-Ukraine Culture project, artificial intelligence could prove a useful aid to authors, students and researchers, but is incapable of replacing a writer, as it lacks its own life experience, says Rostislav Semkiv, director of the ‘Fakel’ publishing house , as he stated in an interview with the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
“I view artificial intelligence in much the same way as I view nuclear energy. It can be used for good, or it can be used for harm. It all depends on exactly how a person uses this tool,” said Semkiv.
According to him, AI can help to find sources, structure information, select relevant literature and improve the logic of texts, just as lecturers, editors or academic supervisors used to do.
At the same time, he cautioned against completely shifting creative and intellectual work onto algorithms.
“As an assistant, it’s an excellent tool. As a substitute for one’s own thinking, it’s a bad idea,” emphasised Semkiv.
He also pointed out that artificial intelligence still frequently makes mistakes, particularly when it comes to Ukrainian literature or highly specialised topics, and can sometimes invent facts that do not exist.
Commenting on the emergence of books written with the help of AI, Semkiv noted that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish such texts based solely on formal characteristics. However, the main difference, in his view, lies elsewhere.
‘Literature is, first and foremost, the transmission of experience. A person writes drawing on their own life, observations and experiences. Artificial intelligence has no such experience,’ he said.
According to Semkiv, a writer always brings their own life context, emotions and observations into the text, whereas artificial intelligence merely generalises from a vast number of texts that have already been created.
“True literature is always an attempt to express oneself, one’s environment, one’s context and one’s own story. And it is precisely in this regard that artificial intelligence has very serious limitations,” Semkiv concluded.
As previously reported, the director of the ‘Fakel’ publishing house , believes that Ukrainian libraries should be transformed into modern community cultural centres, that the world is taking an increasing interest in Ukraine through literature, and that the full-scale war has already shaped a new generation of Ukrainian writers. He also stated that Ukraine’s book market continues to grow despite the war, and that audiobooks could become one of the drivers of its development. Furthermore, in June, the building housing the ‘Fakel’ publishing house in Kyiv was flooded due to a fault in the heating network, resulting in damage to around 30 per cent of its book collection.