Sberbank has released a new book titled Dead Souls. Second Volume. Revival, a sequel to Nikolai Gogol's classic novel generated by the GigaChat AI model. The project involved a team of historians, linguists, literary scholars, and engineers who worked for over a year to develop the text.
To train GigaChat, developers used the complete works of Gogol, his letters, drafts, and notebooks, alongside writings by his contemporaries such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. The model was also trained on religious texts, philosophical works, and art pieces favored by the author.
The quality of the generated text was evaluated using a system of 11 parameters, including lexical diversity, syntax, and the presence of grotesque elements. Experts verified each episode to ensure the AI created new semantic content rather than simply compiling existing fragments of Gogol's work.
The publication includes 21 illustrations generated by GigaChat in the style of A. Agin, who created the original illustrations for the first volume of Dead Souls. This initiative follows previous Sberbank projects involving AI, such as Digital Peter and the restoration of lost paintings.
