Kull uses AI to imagine Nobel speeches for three writers

In a literary-history experiment, Aivar Kull asked artificial intelligence to imagine Nobel Prize speeches for three writers, ERR reports. He said the results were surprisingly good, capturing what he saw as each author’s essential character and message.

Kull chose Jüri Talvet, Priidu Beier and Rein Veidemann, describing them as longtime colleagues. He gave the speeches to all three and said none objected. When Kull presented Veidemann with his imagined speech at a gathering for the writer’s 80th birthday on October 20 at Tartu’s Literary House, Veidemann replied that there had to be room for humour, or life would be much harder.

Kull said the texts were not parodies, though readers might detect something like a friendly caricature. He contrasted the approach with conventional literary histories that list works and provide academic assessments, saying he wanted to explore unusual perspectives on literature.

In the imagined speech for Talvet, the writer appears as a traveller and mediator, shaped by books, the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America and his native Estonia. The speech argues that spiritual life often emerges at the margins rather than in global centres, which it portrays as preoccupied with technology and economic power.

It invokes Miguel de Unamuno and Juhan Liiv as intellectual influences. Liiv, the speech says, needed only a blizzard, a blackbird and his own bleeding heart to express universal human tragedy.