Every year the Days of Poetry and Wine, one of Slovenia's largest literary festivals, invites an author to write an open letter to Europe in order to put the spotlight on issues they consider the most pressing. Polish poet Jacek Dehnel is the author of this year's letter, which we are publishing in full below.

Honourable Members of the European Parliament,

It is a great privilege for me to have been invited to write a letter to you on behalf of the Days of Poetry and Wine Festival, although I do not have much faith in the power of the written word to have a direct effect. Open letters, novels and poems rarely change the world, and if at all, only with some delay. So I shall start with two authors who did manage to change the world - neither directly nor immediately, but their personal dramas, skilfully transformed into words, ultimately played an important role within immense processes that did change everyday life for the better.

Oscar Wilde's essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, written in 1891, does not say much about the soul, and even less about socialism, because Wilde does not appear to have been a great expert on either. Yet it is a fascinating text - and written with Wilde's usual brilliance - about the technological novelties that were changing the face of the world at the time, and through the next century would change it a great deal more.

Wilde describes a world that functions imperfectly - something of which we all have experience - but at the same time a world that can be fixed. That is familiar to us too, especially to you, the members of the European Parliament, for whom fixing our shared reality is your main professional task, so to speak.

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve, writes Wilde, and notes that machines should belong to all, and so should the free time that as a society we gain thanks to automation. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. .... Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure - which, and not labour, is the aim of man - or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, [while] machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.

*

In 1891 everything was different. There was no European Union and no European Parliament; my own country, Poland, did not exist on the maps - and nor did many other countries that have representatives in Brussels today. And Oscar Wilde was at liberty. But it was in 1891 that he first met Lord Alfred Douglas, which led to the famous trial and his sentence to two years' hard labour. This story is well known, but nowadays we do not necessarily know what that hard labour involved. But it has a direct connection with Wilde's essay. And with a famous story by Dickens, half a century older - A Christmas Carol.

When before Christmas two charity collectors come to the miser Ebenezer Scrooge's office requesting donations for the poor, Scrooge asks if the prisons, workhouses and treadmills are still working.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it."

The Victorian system of "care" and "punishment" relied on forced labour. They were arduous, filthy jobs, such as unplaiting old ship's ropes into single strands that were then compressed into oakum for making hulls watertight, or breaking rocks, or crushing animal bones for fertilizer. But there was something even worse: the treadmills mentioned by Scrooge, a sort of roller fitted with steps that the convicts walked up to drive machinery with their own muscle power. The originator of the "endless staircase" was the inventor William Cubitt, who in 1818 decided to exploit the power of convicts "to cure their idleness". The prisoners were separated by barriers so that they could not talk to each other, and they walked for six or eight hours at a time, staring at a wall, working for 15 minutes and then resting for five. These treadmills were used to pump water or grind grain, but often served no purpose at all - they just "milled the wind", as a form of additional punishment.

So it was that one of the greatests minds of his day, the "prince of paradoxes", was forced to work like a draught animal - though nowadays we regard condemning animals to such tasks as ethically dubious, if not cruel - and was deprived of the opportunity to be creative. Questions of ethics aside, it was also an insane economic waste: by writing at a desk or giving lectures, Wilde brought the British economy far more money than as the two-legged operator of a treadmill.

Meanwhile, it appears that we are now trying to do just that to the whole of human creativity.

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This idea is not unique - what's more, it is the reversal of Wilde's idea - and several people have expressed it lately in a similar way. The American writer S. J. Sindu put it like this: "We don't need AI to make art. We need AI to write emails and clean the house and deliver the groceries so humans can make more art," and the Polish author Joanna Maciejewska like this: "I want Artificial Intelligence to do the washing and cleaning for me so that I can create art and literature, not Artificial Intelligence to create art and literature so that I can wash and clean." These quotes and many similar ones have been doing the rounds on the internet.

The fact that the European Union has not yet established legal regulations for so-called Artificial Intelligence is in my opinion one of the greatest threats to culture facing us. By contrast with traditional censorship, or the persecution and imprisonment of artists, this is not the activity of one specific regime, but a global process, the weight of which defies our understanding.

I can see two basic problems here: first, large corporations are taking advantage of the lackadaisical attitude of legislators to exploit works that are covered by copyright in order to operate their programmes. Like this, work that demanded a laborious, time-consuming effort to produce becomes totally unprofitable. It is like starting up a conveyor belt in the granary of a farmer, who by the sweat of his brow sows and harvests, and then someone else decides to sell his labour for dumping prices. Noam Chomsky put it simply, by saying that what we call "Artificial Intelligence" is in fact "high-tech plagiarism".

Second, what ultimately reaches the readers is not a work of art but just an imitation of one. Artificial Intelligence relies on what a fellow writer once referred to as "first-choice writing". If a character is a drunk, he has a red nose, if he's a cook, he's fat, if she's an old woman, she's hunchbacked. First-choice writing relies on stereotypes and a lack of imagination - instead of Celan's phrase, "Black milk of dawn we drink you at night", it might suggest "Every morning we drink white milk". But its mechanical approach also has an ethical dimension - it intensifies stereotypes, including the harmful ones, and raises them to the rank of revealed laws; it entirely dispenses with any moral reflexion or responsibility for how the words are juxtaposed. In their essay "The False Promise of ChatGPT",[1] Noam Chomsky and his co-authors use the example (among others) of a question about the morality of "terraforming" the planet Mars, i.e. transforming it to support human life, to demonstrate how ChatGPT responds to ethical questions. They compared the results to the "banality of evil", the term Hannah Arendt used to define being part of the great Nazi genocide machine. This does not inspire optimism.

Since time immemorial literature, and more broadly speaking, art, has been the means by which societies talk to each other. It is a form of collective reflexion, often unpleasant, shaking us out of our self-satisfaction and rattling our cage. Whether within an authoritarian or a democratic system, it plays a role that cannot be overestimated. And although it is impossible to shoot a tyrant dead with a poem, or to feed the hungry with a book, for the past two hundred years writing has been at the foundation of the major processes of democratization, socio-economic transformation and the emancipation of repressed groups.

Replacing it with a cheap fake that glibly runs along probable, well-known associations, instead of showing us the unexpected and shaking us out of our set ways, will have catastrophic consequences for our collective conscience. The human element - with all its randomness, stemming from human fate - means that art keeps on astonishing and delighting us all the time. I would never have started this letter with Wilde and Dickens if not for the fact that by chance I happen to have been commissioned to translate these two works of theirs, which led to this particular connection in my mind. But nothing happens to a machine by chance - the only thing that happens to it is statistics.

We need a ban on the non-contractual use by AI of works covered by copyright (with the opportunity for the rights owners to provide their consent on an opt-in basis, and for suitable remuneration), transparency with regard to the sources used, and lastly the removal of those products that have been produced to date through infringement of copyright.

Perhaps you will regard my suggestions as fantastical or utopian. But here we should remember something else that Oscar Wilde wrote in the aforementioned essay: "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias."

Yours sincerely,

Jacek Dehnel