Patron’s evening What is Real, What is Fake?

Tuesday, May 12th
18:00
Culture Club Salong, Tartu Literature House

Meelis Friedenthal: “Since 2023, when a working group was convened at the initiative of the Estonian Literary Museum to engage with large language models – so that they might better learn Estonian language and culture – I have at times thought about this topic to the point of exhaustion, met with various practitioners and theorists, worried frequently and needlessly, debated questions of copyright, tried (with limited success) to make the voices of writers heard, fine-tuned models on a GPU bought at the right moment to learn early modern Latin and Greek texts, nudged Chinese models into writing better Estonian using my own work, vibe-coded the platform VUTT (Early Modern Texts Workbench, you know), brooded in forums apocalyptically yearning for the singularity or equally apocalyptically predicting the annihilation of all humankind, watched far too many videos about artificial intelligence (lately leaning towards those made by Anthropic’s Claude), thought about moving to the countryside and perhaps even keeping bees, tried to understand whether the alchemists and occultists of the past felt the same as we do now, read science fiction, read history, compared, questioned. Nobody knows anything. And I feel stretched thin, like too little butter on a slice of bread. All of this is what we will talk about. And alongside that, Jaanus Kaasik will present texts, music and visuals.”

In Estonian.