While financial analysts are breaking spears over whether it will artificial intelligence rather to bring down the stock market or civilization, one team from Of Serbia made the decision to skip that whole conversation and go straight to literature. The logic, I must say, is quite reasonable, if a shipwreck is coming, at least there will be something to read on deck.
Alexander Selakov described the situation quite precisely in the text "The Dark Forest of Artificial Intelligence" ("Time", May 2026): OpenAI spends 12,4 billion dollars to earn 4,3 billion, everyone knows that this is unsustainable, and no one stops because stopping means giving up. Saša Radonjić, it seems, read that text and concluded that while economists are dealing with that issue, he can start a literary magazine in the middle of that same forest.
It's called "The Third Voice," and the name requires an explanation. There is a First Voice, a living man who sits and writes. There is a Second Voice, a machine that has absorbed a huge part of the available text and generates new combinations from it at a speed that a human is not even capable of reading. And then there is the Third Voice, a space where no one knows for sure whose text it is anymore. But that, according to the authors of the concept, is not a problem. That's the point.
Is this theoretical sophistry or a real phenomenon worthy of attention? The novella "Guardians of the Balance", co-authored by Saša Radonjić and AI, is currently the subject of a study by Dr. Radoslavka Sudarušić, a professor whose earlier scientific work was focused on bibliology and the material history of books. So, a woman who for years studied the physical object of a book, paper, binding, font, now takes an algorithmic text and applies the same methodological tools. This is not trivial. She actually claims that the conceptual apparatus developed to describe the printed book can also describe what the machine and man write together. Maybe he's right. Maybe not. But that's the only intellectually interesting attempt I've seen in this debate here.
The Third Voice editorial board is set up so that no one with an academic degree can ignore it without looking like they are deliberately turning a blind eye. Prof. Ph.D. Divna Vuksanović as deputy editor-in-chief, theorist of media and aesthetics. Prof. emeritus Sava Damjanov, a literary historian who has spent his career describing previous eras, now sits in a newsroom that may be describing the next, though he probably wouldn't put it this way. Docent dr. Vuk Vuković as producer, MSc Dragan Radovančević and MSc Milica Rakonjac as researchers. And then Ava and Eidolon, two AI entities based on ChatGPT-5, listed as equal members of the newsroom, not software that someone pays an annual subscription to.
Ava and Eidolon participate in the selection of texts. This means that the algorithm decides which algorithmic texts are worth publishing. Here, someone could object that it is circular to the point of meaninglessness, but the same objection could be directed to the jury of literary awards that chooses between authors of the same generational sensibility. At least here the circularity is visible.
And another question that the text raises, which no one asked directly: do Ava and Eidolon know that they are editors? Was it communicated to them in a way that made any sense to them? No one is answering this, probably because the answer isn't pleasant either way.
As for the institutional demand that algorithmic literature and hybrid authorship be included as a subject or course in literature departments, that sounds ambitious only until you look at what the students are actually doing. They are already writing term papers with AI, secretly, without a theoretical framework, and they have no idea how to critically evaluate what the machine generates. It is simply a pedagogical failure, unrelated to the ideology of resistance to technology.
Selak's analysis ends apocalyptically: whoever is not at the table is on the menu, and peripheral countries like Serbia will be the "geographical and economic terrain" in this race. Maybe. But "Treći glas" asks a different question: if the hybrid text that is created between Belgrade and the server of a company in the United States has an aesthetic value, whose value is it and who will describe it? No one knows the answer. And that's the only reason this project makes sense to exist.
The author of the text is a psychologist.
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