The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) outlines a new scenario in the economic and social sphere and introduces new formulas for production and consumption on a global level. It is estimated that the use and implementation of this new technology could affect 40% of current jobs, especially in the most advanced countries. This is reflected in the latest report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which indicated that 60% of the world’s workers would experience a direct impact from this technology. Either through the reorientation of tasks and job requalification or with the emergence of new professional profiles based on data analysis and science, cybersecurity or process automation.
This technological revolution has opened some doubts and numerous debates in the industrial, educational, health and cultural sectors inside and outside the EU. Due in part to the legal, privacy or intellectual property gaps that such technology poses with respect to the manual work known to date.
Faced with this scenario, the International University of Valencia-VIU advocates protecting and promoting creativity and the value of the Humanities from the defense of reading and the social role of the writer. That is the mission promoted by the Planeta Chair of Literature and Society, a joint project between the Editorial Division of Grupo Planeta and the International University of Valencia-VIU that was recently presented at the L’Iber Museum in Valencia and which included the participation by Francesc Bracero, journalist and head of Consumer Technology at La Vanguardia; the writer and poet Ana Merino (director of this Chair) and the writer Lorenzo Silva. The Rector of VIU, Eva María Giner, who presented the event, agrees with this spirit of union and literary exchange.
One of the areas that this Chair will address in detail will be Artificial Intelligence in the field of literature. And it will do so through meetings with writers, open debates and the creation of a Reading Club with a transversal perspective. “With the Planeta Chair of Literature and Society we want the International University of Valencia to be that space where we can recover the social influence of literature and where writers can reflect on their present,” highlights the writer and director of the Chair, Ana Merino.
For Merino, the role of writers is key within that social cohesion that the Chair seeks to establish through active and faithful reading, because it is they “as social agents who must open dialogues with the society of which they are part so that so we can understand each other.” A deliberative and open space where, as the director of the Chair herself indicates, the book “returns literature to everyday life.”
The Rector of VIU agrees with this spirit of union and literary exchange, for whom this Chair favors academic and social collaboration “reinforcing the role of authors, scholars and editors in the cultural industry of which they are part. That is the meaning of this Chair and also that of our Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Communication, which promotes the transfer of knowledge in order to build a more civic citizenship.”
For Francesc Bracero, the worrying aspect of AI in the journalism sector lies in the approach of “replacing journalists with algorithms, which makes the profession even more precarious.” In the journalist’s opinion, “there are things that a machine still cannot do, which is picking up the phone and raising a topic, because the machine can automate texts, but it will never put the interior that a journalist has.”
In the opinion of the writer Lorenzo Silva, AI in literary creation lacks the differential value that justifies a literary creation standing out from the rest. Is it ethical to use a tool that has parasitized the creation of living companions and also mine? AI in the literary field is that by observing human responses… AI simulates human feelings, ideas… aspirations. “AI is lethal.” For Silva, “only what emerges from the inner darkness of the creator with his individual gaze, from the impact that things have on human beings, is what has differential value. The only thing the machine can do is simulate, copy, what human beings who have already lived have done.”