“I am very concerned about the issue of children being educated today already heavily dependent on artificial intelligence (AI), which writes for them,” stated the writer, considering this situation as “catastrophic.”
In the last panel of the Fólio – International Literary Festival of Óbidos, the author supported the notion that with this dependence, children “are not learning to write, they are not learning to think,” as “putting thoughts into words is thinking.”
According to Shriver, “language is a marvelous pathway to creativity” and “expression and is a wonderful tool.”
“If our children do not learn to write, they will not truly understand the language itself,” warned the journalist and writer.
She lamented that this constitutes “the death of language.”
As a speaker on a panel about the theme ‘Death,’ the writer discussed death in her books, tackling the subject in ‘Shall We Stay or Should We Go’ in a lighter and more humorous manner, but addressing it more seriously in other works, from the perspective of how “the reader experiences death, through the death of the character.”
“Mortality is very useful for fictional writing, without it novels wouldn’t work,” said the writer, who debated the topic with Rui Cardoso Martins, author of ‘As melhoras da morte.’
“Death is never metaphorical when someone close to us dies,” affirmed the author, stating that, more than his own death, he is concerned about the death of his loved ones.
Death, which “is in almost all of the great works,” according to these authors, was the theme of this last authors’ panel of the festival, which concludes today in the town.
The conversation was also supposed to feature this year’s Nobel Literature laureate, László Krasznahorkai, but the Hungarian writer canceled his participation in the festival due to health reasons, according to the organization.
Krasznahorkai would have been the third Nobel Literature laureate to participate in the edition marking 10 years of Fólio, bringing around 800 authors to the town, located in the Leiria district.
In the 15 author panels held since October 9, two other Nobel laureates participated: Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, awarded in 2015, and South African author J. M. Coetzee, distinguished in 2003.
Organized by the municipality of Óbidos, in collaboration with the municipal enterprise Óbidos Criativa, the Ler Devagar bookstore, and the Inatel Foundation, Fólio has been held since 2015 in the town, which is designated as a Creative City of Literature by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
