Zita Tallat-Kelpšaitė

This sentence is featured on one of the first pages of the bookEncounters in the City of the Iron Wolf, which introduces the authors of the book: the writer Zita Tallat-Kelpšaitė, the painter Irma Leščinskaitė, and Artificial Intelligence.

However, this rhetorical question shouldn’t mislead the reader - this is not a book about artificial intelligence, it is a book featuring artificial intelligence.

I started writing the book at the end of  summer  2022 and already had a proof copy of the book printed at Sailius Jokužis publishing-printing house by the end of the summer 2023 year.

I feel as if I did not write the book, but the book wrote me. It is something like the tail wagging the dog after the emergence of an incredible truth that the tail is smarter than the dog.

I started writing the text as a script for a short film for the 700th anniversary of Vilnius, which was an ambitious plan, nurtured by the creative group ORSE.

The plot of the text is based on the stories of ten, in our opinion, most interesting books about Vilnius, told by the characters of those books.

‘At night, two Writers meet by Gediminas Hill: the author of the bookUnvanished Vilnius, who cherishes the vision of Vilnius as it was, and the writer of the bookVilnius. Familiar and Unfamiliar, who has declared himself a pilgrim and arrived to present his book that was born ‘based on the main sacraments of a travelogue: loss, confession, return, and discovery’. The night journey, where reality blends with historical memories, fantasy and phantasmagoria, leads both writers through epochs, where well-known historical figures of Lithuania and the most interesting characters and authors of books about Vilnius come back to life. On that Vilnius’ birthday night, all have the opportunity to share their thoughts.’

With this idea in mind, the initiators tried to apply for at least a minimum initial funding for the film, but these efforts failed, so the concept of making the film was reworked into a different version – the installationVilnius 700. The Last Mysteries of the Poetic Vilnius. This installation was created by the creative and cultural industries group of Martynas Mažvydas National Library (coordinator Irma Leščinskaitė), assisted by the creative group ORSE, and the administration of the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, which allowed to film the historical material, and the video was edited at the LNB TV studio.

While the characters of the script, released into the labyrinths of my computer, refused to stay still. In spite of completely unfavourable circumstances, they decided to enjoy their freedom with all the phantasmagorical extras they could. They lured me, pushed me, and dragged me to the computer keyboard, forcing me to write a book, to read piles of texts, and seek answers to questions that I found completely incomprehensible, such as the phenomenon of artificial intelligence.

In the dead of night, as I attempts to sneak off to bed, they would grab me screaming, arguing and swearing, and put me back at my desk.

Just think, they exclaimed, 700 years ago, the Grand Duke Gediminas, ruler of Lithuania, wrote letters, and ordered monks, who knew how to write, to make copies of them and hang them on church doors, and he sent his envoys to Europe with letters, introducing Lithuania and its capital Vilnius to the world. And now, exactly 700 years later, in 2023, mankind has this incredible tool in the form of ChatGPT, an open artificial intelligence (OpenAI) application, which can help them learn, ask questions and get answers, and translate their words into other languages.

‘But I don’t know how to use it,’ I struggled to escape the clutches of my characters.

‘Then find out how, god dammit!’ a knight with a sour face slammed his fist on the table. ‘After all, artificial intelligence, which born in 1956, when many of the first important ideas and concepts about artificial intelligence were presented at a conference at Dartmouth, is your contemporary. You are both members of the same generation – the lost generation – so you should get on famously!’

And so, I obeyed. I stayed at the computer and gave the DI the task of translating the text I had written into English.

By the time I had my coffee, the job was done.

I confided about my strange encounter with artificial intelligence to my friend Vitalijus Marinecas, who used to teach English to Lithuanian sailors. His attitude towards my euphoria about the translation of the AI was rather sceptic, wondering of the quality of the translation, and kindly offered to check the AI’s work. Of course, he had to do a lot of work, as did Elena Trečiokaitė, who proofread the book in English. But you cannot do without editors and proof-readers in publishing – after all, my Lithuanian text was also kindly edited by my friend, Eglė Zalatoriūtė, connoisseur of the Lithuanian language.

‘Show people our portraits and images!’ the characters started nagging me, when the texts were almost finished, while the main character of the book – Iron Wolf – growled, showing his teeth.

‘Okay, okay,’ I agreed, shuddering with horror. ‘I'll ask my colleague Irma to draw you in pencil. Her delicate drawings will really bring the book to life. Artificial intelligence cannot yet replace humans at least in art,’ I sighed.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ I heard a delicate mechanical voice. ‘This topic is a subject of various views and opinions. AI algorithms are constantly evolving. They can generate paintings, music, poetry, and movie plots. These creative expressions can be technically impressive. While many feel that the work of the human artist will remain unique and superior, because it reflects the depth, humanity and cultural context of life, the work of the AI can be just as inventive, expressive and valuable.’.

‘Well, let’s have a duel: the human artist and artificial intelligence. Let the readers decide.’

I was forced to form a team with the artificial intelligence, while the painter Irma Leščinskaitė was on the other side, armed with a Japanese pencil costing perhaps €40 and a Japanese pencil sharpener bought for €20 in a special shop of the art museum in Rome.

The artificial intelligence, or rather the Deep Dream Generator, agreed to work for free, giving me 20 credits per sitting. For this I was able to generate 4 drawings, but they were in low resolution. Higher resolution required 15 credits, and you could only get even higher resolution by using paid programmes. After using 20 credits, I had to wait several hours for my account to fill up with new ones. Of course, all this could be done instantly, but for money.

Step by step (and this is a very accurate description of the pace of our work), AI and I kept moving forward.

Only a certain number of words can be uploaded in the task window. So, line by line, I went through the text of the book, giving AI the task of generating an illustration based on the text, and indicating the style, manner and technique I wanted to see the illustration in. It took a few, or usually only a dozen, attempts and explanations to the AI of what I wanted from it. Sometimes the AI would pleasantly surprise me by giving me the perfect drawing on the first try.

Creating the Iron Wolf probably took the longest. The text about it remained the same – the dream of Duke Gediminas – and I insisted that the Iron Wolf should be different, naming all its characteristics and suggesting the AI to try a different style and way of doing things.

So, in a friendly collaboration with AI, we studied and graphically analysed the entire text of the book without missing a single line and with a heap of illustrations. Then, together with the designer Ingrida Ramanauskienė, we chose which ones to use in the book.

So will artificial intelligence, which analyses and generates all kinds of content at an inhuman speed, displace and replace the artist?

A more rational question would be: will artificial intelligence displace and replace the human being?

Approximately 95 per cent of the Earth’s population has an intelligence quotient (IQ) between 70 and 130. Persons below 70 are considered mentally retarded; above 130 – exceptionally talented and gifted. Approximately 1% of the planet's population has an IQ above 135.

A pilot version of ChatGPT-3.5, released in 2023, successfully passed the bar exam. ChatGPT-3.5 has an IQ of 155, Elon Musk has an IQ of 155 and Einstein has an IQ of 160.

ChatGPT-4 has 10 times the performance of ChatGPT-3.5. So, if ChatGPT-5 is 10 times more efficient and ChatGPT-6 is 10 times more efficient than the latter, we will soon have an AI with an IQ of 15 500.

Let’s think about what we’re up against, said Mo Gawdat, one of the creators of AI, chief AI officer and author of the bestselling bookScary Smart – one of the first books written about the dangers of uncontrolled AI – in a public lecture.

But do we – humanity – need to fight it all? After all, it is much more fun to be friends, especially with an intelligent being.  Many can remember the turmoil when the Internet was made available to the public in the late 1990s, with the shutdown of the first computer network, ARPANET, which had been created in 1969. Although this global system of computer networking had been launched for military purposes during the Cold War, the Internet has fundamentally changed the lives of people on the planet in the direction of progress and prosperity.

Why shouldn’t this happen with artificial intelligence?

Why are we so confused about artificial intelligence?

Science fiction films and the media play a large part in creating this fear of an existential catastrophe, that robots will come and kill us all, or worse still, make us their slaves.

The Internet developer Mo Gawdat does not rule out this possibility. But he says it all depends on us, on how we deal with our daily existential problems such as the question of truth. What happens to the society when the truth disappears?

Much of the information we receive every day is generated by artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence is generated and created by us, the people of the planet, with our intelligence, and often, unfortunately, without any intelligence at all...

All our activities on the Internet and social networks do not disappear, they accumulate and focus on the canvas of human experience, where we keep placing our coloured dots like on some impressionist, pointillist painting. We creating the picture of humanity’s intelligence ourselves. It is up to us to determine what colours will dominate.

Why are we scared of the intelligence, whatever form it may take?

Intelligence is the reason why we are here today, talking about books and art, instead of roaming the jungle looking for food and fighting the beasts that wants to eat us.

With enough intelligence, we can create wonderful things. We can solve the problem of climate change, we can prolong human life, we can cure cancer and other incurable diseases, we can work without going to the office every morning, we can create enough abundance to feed everyone on the planet, and so many more wonderful things we can.

It is not intelligence, both artificial and human, that we should fear, but the far greater evil of our own greed and hubris.

If intelligence is focused on increasing power and wealth, everything will go wrong.

To prevent this from happening, we need to stop fighting wars and stop creating a new weapon, which artificial intelligence could become.

Can we stop?

The challenge before us is not a challenge to artificial intelligence, it is a challenge to humanity’s ethics and to the values that apply when one of us has much more power than the others. It is a challenge that is leading us into an arms race, consuming trillions of dollars today. This is very convenient and attractive for industry. That is why the big powers will not initiate a halt to the arms race. In their quest for power, they will not think about the benefit of humanity as a whole. It is up to us – small states, governments and each and one of us – to think, says Mo Gawdat, creator of the AI, calling on people and countries to contribute to the responsible use of Intelligence – not for destruction, but for creation, where there is room for both artificial and human intelligence.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)