Lisbon, Feb. 11, 2026 (Lusa) - Writer Lídia Jorge today called for vigilance regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI), in a defence of "autonomous and unique thinking", in her speech during the presentation of the Pessoa 2025 Prize in Lisbon, which she won.
For the author of the novel "Misericórdia" (2022), "in today's world, which is broken and on the verge of hallucination," language, poetry, and thought are crucial, as is vigilance regarding the power of machines and falsehoods that are difficult to dismantle.
"Generative AI imitates, and imitation can pass for an emotional invention coming from an entity that does not experience emotion," she said. AI "has neither affliction, nor astonishment, nor pain, nor anger, nor joy, nor tears," it only "provides language as if it had them."
Thus, the writer argued in a speech in which she evoked the importance of Fernando Pessoa, his work and his heteronyms, "an epistemological cut between the creator and the creature".
Therefore, for Lídia Jorge, "in the name of the future, it is advisable to remain vigilant".
"We are probably on the verge of obtaining fantastic benefits for our lives, but we must realise that our autonomous and unique thinking may be completely annihilated amid the flood of benefits. Our hope is that language, which in Christian mythology establishes us as the beginning, will have no end as long as we are its owners," she warned.
The author referred to her experience with the GPT and Gemini chats, which "offered her two finished solutions free of charge," "but false ones," from fragments of Álvaro de Campos's "Ode to the Night," which is suspended when "the moon begins to be real."
"The chats in question imitated what was possible to imitate, the type of language. The rest is falsehood. However, it is not easy to dismantle it," assured Lídia Jorge.
"To assess what is happening in today's world, which is decomposed, on the verge of hallucination, it is good to use Poetics as a field of research," she argued, noting that "Poetry corresponds to the most sophisticated articulation of languages, metaphor corresponds to an alchemical engineering of language, it serves as the last wall that stands without yielding against algorithmic intervention in the construction of discourse."
In a speech in which she mentioned previous winners of the Pessoa Prize, Lídia Jorge said that "it was a huge surprise" when she was told last December that she was the winner of the 39th edition.
An award that "by its nature and the name of its patron" “intimidates” her, the writer confessed. She revealed that she needs "to imagine that the angel of good humour is hanging" laughing at her when she receives it.
"Perhaps mocking me for the fact that, for a few moments, the cloak of a king was draped over my ordinary literary clothes," considering that Fernando Pessoa, the patron of the award, "is more than a king, he is the emperor of 20th-century poetry."
"Everything in his work, of which his life is a chapter, and not the other way around, is powerful and touching. Even his colossal contradictions," said Lídia Jorge, before turning to one of the biographers of the author of “Mensagem”, Richard Zenith, who spoke of him "as one who, in the face of the visible, whatever its nature, sought the invisible in an absolute way".
Asserting herself as a narrator who emerged with democracy, she stated: "We, who came in the 1980s [of the 20th century], were in a hurry to cut through the memory of a poor, muzzled homeland that was in pieces across Africa and suddenly wanted to appear decolonised, modern and rich, but was not yet so, and still today is slow to become so."
At the beginning of her speech, Lídia Jorge, who has been a State Councillor since 2021, thanked the President of the Republic for his presence at the ceremony, which she considered a gift to herself.
Addressing Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, she said: "They call you the President of affection, but that is not enough. You were and continue to be the President who knew how to explain the workings of democracy to the people. And that is an extraordinary legacy."
The writer Lídia Jorge received the Pessoa Prize today at a ceremony at the headquarters of Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) in Lisbon, which was also attended by the Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Margarida Balseiro Lopes.
The writer was honoured last December in an edition of the award whose jury included Francisco Pedro Balsemão as chairman, Paulo Macedo, chairman of the executive committee of CGD, which sponsors the award, Ana Pinho, Ana Tostões, António Barreto, Clara Ferreira Alves, Diogo Lucena, Emílio Rui Vilar, José Luís Porfírio, Maria Manuel Mota, Pedro Norton, Rui Magalhães Baião, Rui Vieira Nery and Viriato Soromenho-Marques.
In its minutes, the jury highlighted the "creative and diverse writing" of the author of “Misericórdia”, who "has been able to reveal the power of literature to help understand the great challenges of the contemporary world", as well as "her courageous civic intervention", which "has contributed decisively to enriching the democratic debate in Portuguese society".
"Lídia Jorge's work covers a very broad spectrum of themes, from the impact of extreme life situations on her characters to the recreation of contexts that evoke decisive historical moments in Portuguese life over the last century, particularly in the period after 25 April [1974], such as decolonisation, the transition from dictatorship to democracy, social exclusion and the emergence of new phenomena of discrimination and social fracture," reads the jury's decision.
Born 79 years ago in Boliqueime, in the Algarve, Lídia Jorge made her debut as a novelist in 1980 with "O Dia dos Prodígios" (The Day of Prodigies). Throughout her career, she has received the most important Portuguese and international literary awards, such as the Médicis Prize for Best Foreign Novel published in France, for "Misericórdia" (Mercy), in 2023, and the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages in 2020, from Guadalajara, one of the most important in Latin America.
In addition to the Pessoa Prize, the author of "O Vale da Paixão" (1998) and "Os Memoráveis" (2014) has received other distinctions, namely the Latinidade, União Latina and Luso-Espanhol de Arte e Cultura awards.
The Portuguese state awarded her the Grand Cross of the Order of Infante D. Henrique, and France awarded her the Order of Arts and Letters.
The Pessoa Prize is worth 70,000 euros.
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