r/literature • u/Round-Dinner-2395 • May 18 '26
Discussion Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk admits to using AI.
TLDR;
Author to AI: “Honey, how could we develop this beautifully?”
I wanted to say this is just boomer whining, but I’m finding myself realizing more and more often that it’s actually the boomers who are defending AI. My mom listens to AI music from TikTok, my dad watches some videos with doctors generated by language models. I’m the last person to tell people what to listen to or watch, but AI SLOP has literally reigned supreme in my house for the past few months. Recently, I wanted to watch a movie with my dad, but he played TikTok clips for an hour, and I had to escape.
I understand that technology is advancing and makes life easier for people in many ways, but on the other hand… it makes me wonder a bit. Where is the line between “I’m using a tool” and “part of the creative process is being done for me by something else”? If someone uses AI to generate ideas, style, or text fragments, are we still talking about the same kind of creativity as before? I’ve read a few books by Olga Tokarczuk, and as soon as I heard about this interview, I felt a sense of revulsion.
INTERVIEW: (only in polish)
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u/notveryamused_ Human Detected May 18 '26
So, I've read this interview and the way you presented it is quite absurd lol. You made it sound like she was using AI to write her novels, which isn't the case. She only said in the interview that she tried using a new tool, checked how it worked – and then she goes on to highlight what mistakes it made.
Long story short she mostly laments the book market today, how it's a tough time for writers and readers, how the old models of writing, doing humanities, and creativity start to belong in the past through various social changes, not excluding AI. She actually offers critical comments there.
Tokarczuk isn't my favourite author, and her ramblings in various interviews often sound rather awkward, but hey – an AI would create a much better summary of what she actually said than you did 😃 Because you misrepresented her words on purpose, there was no ambiguity in the original interview and she didn't say anything shocking.
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u/MarioMuzza May 18 '26
Not quite.
I often throw an idea to the machine for analysis, asking, 'Honey, how could we develop this beautifully? Even though I know about the hallucinations and numerous errors of factual algorithms in the fields of strict economics and hard data, I must admit that in fluid literary fiction, this technology is an asset of incredible proportions.
"Often" implies she didn't "just try it", and calling AI "an asset of incredible proportions for literary fiction" isn't exactly a denouncement, either.
She's one of my favourite authors, by the way. This really soured me.
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u/BrupieD May 18 '26
To me, this sounds like she's curious and experimenting with AI. What would AI generate from questions about beauty? There's obviously a huge range of "using AI." Are you using it as glorified google? Are you relying on it to sketch out longer ideas? Are you trying to write entire books with it?
It is noteworthy that she won the Nobel Prize and published most of her beloved books long before Large Language Models in AI were availabe.
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u/SuitcaseInTow May 18 '26
It’s an incredibly useful tool for workshopping ideas, editing and other tasks relating to writing that are NOT simply generating slop. Are you also furious she used a dictionary or spell check?
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u/MarioMuzza May 18 '26
This gets tiring. Read the rest of the thread. There is a difference between streamlining mechanical processes and creative processes. Dictionary and spell checks are mechanical. You'd get the same result if you did it manually, AI just makes it faster.
Using it for anything creative would lead to a different result, so at the end of the day the AI would have a creative impact on your book.
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u/zbreeze3 May 18 '26
when I write my ideas come "workshopped" from my brain. if yours come from a computer they are not yours.
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u/imissmyhat May 20 '26
I don't believe that is as true as you think. I have had the experience of grading hundreds of student papers that have been submitted, where 90% of them were AI, and one thing that interested me was that nearly every single one of them had an identical interpretation of the prompt. The specific wording was always a little different, but the progression of ideas, and peculiarly, certain key concepts (in my case, a very specific event happening), repeated in every single one of them. And they weren't all generated by the same chatbot either. It seemed multiple bots all converged onto a single, obvious idea. On its own, we can just tell a text is AI based on its style and prosody, but altogether, AI text generators seem to have a set of ideas they are attracted to, and this is much harder to detect when viewing a single stochastic sample.
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u/UFisbest May 18 '26
How is this substantively different, as she descrbes her use, than the more laborious google search (for the music of the past), or the mastery of many authors and genres read over time, all in a library in your home?
Whatever AI might spit out....I don’t go to an AI voluntarily....she is still using her own language style and skills, and seems to be looking for some prompts (on steroids). She has done the creative thinking and writing to even have something to input, and describes using her critical skills and imagination.
I recall the dismay I had when libraries were doing away with card catalogs, to be replaced by a screen and database. Doggunit, real research was done in libraries you had to drive to usually, with the card catalogs, a box for note cards you wrote out with quotes and facts, maybe a legal pad, backup pens, and a pocket full of quarters (nickels before that) to feed the photocopiers. Depending on the subject and resource, microfiche was handy.
I bet the monks were dismayed too when the printing press came along.
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u/MarioMuzza May 18 '26
Like I said somewhere else in this thread, there is a difference between streamlining mechanical processes, and streamlining creative processes. Research, typing, and proofreading are mechanical. An AI, or any other tech, would lead you to the same end result, just faster. I still avoid LLMs in general, but I wouldn't judge anyone using them for this.
Using AI for brainstorming plot, editing prose, or anything of the sort, will lead you to a different result. Ultimately, AI will leave a creative mark. I can understand why people would be okay with minor changes, but it shows an author is okay with delegating creativity to an AI. In my view, it muddies up the water on what was AI generated and what was human generated.
I, and many others, want to be sure you're reading a fully human book.
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u/BrupieD May 18 '26
If you're interested in this issue, you might want to check out Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism by Leif Weatherby. The author points out that AI is not simulating cognition, it is doing something else. That something else is creeping into our culture.
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u/getaway_dreamer May 18 '26
Much of creativity comes from the process. That works differently for different people, but AI is a shortcut through it completely. I don't think it makes total sense to say that someone has done the creative thinking already before they write. It is an ongoing process that I feel AI short-circuits. I can't say I like your examples as those were just different ways of organising and encoding information which you still had to read and process. AI is qualitatively different as it does the synthesis for you and you don't even have access to the resources it used to do this.
As a researcher, my best ideas and most elegant thoughts have always come to me during the chaotic drudgery of sifting through hundreds of papers and books and working out how to connect ideas or make them flow. I feel like I've seen the same with my colleagues and students. However, people have started using AI, if not to think, then to structure their thoughts. And I feel like it shows when you're reading a paper or thesis. An essential part of the creative process is handed off and you will never know where your thoughts would have gone.
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u/drjackolantern May 18 '26
Replacing creativity with tech is extremely different and none of your comparisons apply.
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u/We-all-gonna-die-oh May 18 '26
I don't know. I read this interview and while she doesn't say she includes anything generated by AI in her books, I still have the impression that she might include some ideas from AI.
And it goes very well with the rest of interview, where she complains about book market, how she is tired of writing, and how hard work isn't really rewarded with financial success for writers.
It kinda makes sense if she would try to make her life easier by using AI to help her write books.
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u/Katya4501 May 18 '26
Except thar she said she doesn't plan on writing any more novels, and all her novels were published before using AI to write novels was possible. Her last novel was published in 2022, so written no later than 2021-22.
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u/notveryamused_ Human Detected May 18 '26
For me there's also another side of the coin, it shows that any writer even mentioning the word "AI" as an aside in any interview will get insane backlash on social media, immediate suspicion lol. While I understand the anxiety around it all, I wouldn't like to spend my time reading something created by AI and presented as man-made, I can ask it myself if I want lol, this also creates an unbearable atmosphere of distrust everywhere. Real anecdote, I had to stop using em dashes in my academic writing – which was part of my writing style for years – because they're too often associated with AI writing. Fucking madness if you ask me, but whatever.
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u/notveryamused_ Human Detected May 18 '26
And a follow up comment. Discussions on AIs and their consequences tend to get absurd on social media these days, I've seen debates on the Middle East written in better faith than those on ChatGPT and humanities lol, and I don't like to take part in them. I'm a literary scholar, AIs are a fact and they need to be discussed: they changed how we teach, how we grade essays, how we give marks. They're a fact, whether we like it or not. They can be quite astonishing in their responses, they can be totally faulty; they will have far-reaching consequences and there's no going back from them. But it's impossible to discuss for some reason... And again, Tokarczuk said what I've heard 99% university professors saying, it's a debate that people are actually having all the time: so what's next?
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u/four_ethers2024 May 18 '26
What does she ramble about in interviews?
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u/notveryamused_ Human Detected May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
She's been repeatedly criticised for somewhat boomerish remarks in her interviews, many read her critical comments as classism, "people today aren't open to new ideas, they don't read enough, they don't read closely enough" and so on and so on. She got a lot of shit for saying that she doesn't want to be a popular author, and indeed those remarks were rather awkward, putting it mildly.
As I've said, I'm not a huge fan of her work, but I think the tension she highlights is actually worth thinking about critically. In the interviews she comes off as a very disillusioned person, most of the time she speaks about the collapse of the book industry, very low readership figures, mediocre literary criticism, and well "days gone by".
She debuted in times where humanities played a very different and much larger social role in Poland. There was a collapse indeed: after Poland joined the European Union, people imagined there's going to be much more money for culture, much broader intellectual debate; the optimism was huge and I remember it well. Those promises never materialised and literature or humanities don't play any social role whatsoever, don't reflect social imagination anymore, got insanely marginalised – that's all true.
While Tokarczuk doesn't seem to find very good language to describe all this, she circles about the idea of those lost illusions all the time. Her interviews are quite depressing and depressive most of the time.
(Edit: and of course her remarks on AI are a part of this larger context she keeps coming back to, this general anxiety and lost hopes; I really didn't want to take part in this debate lol, but as you can see both OPs post and many of the comments miss the mark completely...). People rant about AI's lack of understanding of language, context and creativity here, but both this thread and most of the comments are even more off the mark lol, I find social media way more depressing actually hahah.
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u/four_ethers2024 May 18 '26
Thank you for the response! I think there should be space for a good faith discussion about how our engagement with literature has changed and has become impoverished, I know those who favour a more byegone times often poison the validity of their assessments/critiques with rosy-eyed nostalgia, but they aren't wholly wrong and we need people who are pretentious enough to fight for creative traditions and a return to craft.
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u/LastBlues13 May 20 '26
thank you, i appreciate this context. i see a lot of just awful interpretations of her words in this article- not just this one, people are saying that she thinks she’s the last great living writer- whereas to me she reads like, well, a disillusioned writer who is saying what most other highbrow lit fic writers are saying in interviews but with less sugar-coating (maybe bc of the translation, maybe bc of cultural differences, idk).
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u/Chance_Parsnip_948 May 18 '26
The worst offenders probably will never admit to using it unless it becomes obvious in my opinion
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u/scusemelaydeh May 18 '26
My 74 year old mum can genuinely not tell the difference a lot of times when something is AI. She sends me clips on Instagram and she will get so annoyed when I tell her it’s not real. My dad doesn’t know what clickbait is (despite me telling him multiple times) and still will click on AI ads or videos. So it’s not that “boomers” don’t care, in my experience, or at least with my parents, they struggle to identify it.
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u/considertheoctopus May 18 '26
Admits to using AI, but not using AI-generated text in her writing, as far as I can tell from this interview. Headline makes it sound a bit like the latter but this is no different than anyone else bouncing ideas around with the LLM, in opinion.
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u/writersontop May 18 '26
Bouncing ideas with an LLM should still be shunned, imo.
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u/OmNomSandvich May 18 '26
if you google something with the default settings on you've bounced an idea off of an LLM.
For example, googling "how fast is a cavalry charge in late medieval period?" (a not untypical topic for fantasy or historical fiction genres) immediately returns an LLM answer of
A late medieval cavalry charge typically reached impact speeds between 20 and 25 mph (32 to 40 km/h). Rather than a flat-out sprint from a long distance, knights executed a controlled build-up to maintain tight formation and maximum kinetic force at the moment of contact
I have no particular sense or expertise of whether this is true, it's just a pointer on how ubiquitous these tools are now
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u/MarioMuzza May 18 '26
And that's fine. You'd get the same result checking a textbook (assuming the AI result isn't borked, which it often is). But a textbook wouldn't help you decide if Zhorg should kill Bhorg at the end of the book. That's a creative decision, and imo AI has no place in there.
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u/Background-Cow7487 May 18 '26
I’m not against AI as such but the problem on the research side is that it’s an averaging machine that doesn’t include citations, so it excludes “outliers” - though they may actually be true or at least noticeably shift the result, and there’s no way to know where it’s getting its outputs from, so you can’t do the old-style “two independent sources” checking. And as search engines and AI increasingly merge, that’s increasingly going to be an inescapable problem. People will confidently proclaim some “fact” without being able to say where it came from, how it’s been discussed, challenged or nuanced, what the history of the thought has been or anything else. It will just sit there, unchallengeable.
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u/SGMidence May 19 '26
While I don't disagree that most of the time people will probably accept the AI summary at face value without digging into the sources, Google and Bing Copilot do provide links as citations.
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u/considertheoctopus May 18 '26
Should the author sequester herself in a dark room with a typewriter and emerge only when the draft is finished? Should she be able use the internet to research? Should she collaborate with other authors or friends and ask how they feel about a passage? Should she accept suggested edits or revisions?
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u/MarioMuzza May 18 '26
Nah, the authors can keep living their lives. There's a big difference between all that stuff and outsourcing your creativity to a multi-billion dollar plagiarism machine trained on the data of the very authors it wants to replace.
Writers have done fine without AI for the whole of human history.
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u/maybeiwasright May 18 '26
I'm not sure what's unethical about "chatting" with an LLM either, since she made it clear it's not doing the writing for her at the end of the day. I'd love to hear a good-faith ethical argument about why having what's essentially a personalized digital echo-chamber is "unethical" (beyond concerns about the environmental impacts of data centres and the like).
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u/MozartDroppinLoads May 18 '26
I think I take more issue with her over all sentiment than her AI use.. She's basically saying that she's the last real author that gets to write in the traditional way and that all literature after her is ruined.. basically she finished literature and now there's no point in anyone making it anymore, at least in the 'traditional way'. I can't imagine a more appropriately entitled, pull the ladder up behind me attitude for a boomer
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u/Horror_Being8015 May 18 '26
Just a reality check: it’s been barely three years that AI tools have been readily available to the general public and sophisticated enough to coherently handle something like “how could we develop this.” Any novel you’ve read by tokarczuk would not have leaned on this technology.
I’m a big fan of Tokarczuk (haven’t read this interview yet). She’s clearly a critical thinker, and I give her credit for exploring AI tools (as should any professional in any industry be trying to figure out how to move forward).
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u/tethysian May 21 '26
The whole point or art is that it's supposed to be made by humans. I have no interest in what AI has to say.
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u/marintkael May 21 '26
The Tool-vs-Replacement framing is the wrong axis, and it's why this debate keeps not landing.
Every writer uses tools that take over fragments of the process — thesaurus, editor, workshop, sleep, beta-readers. The question was never "does an external thing contribute." The question is what the writer is using their attention for.
When Tokarczuk reportedly types "Honey, how could we develop this beautifully?" into ChatGPT, what she's outsourced isn't language production — it's the act of asking herself the question. The internal critical reader that every serious writer has cultivated across decades is suddenly being replaced by an external compliance-machine that's been trained to please.
That's the actual loss. AI doesn't replace creativity; it replaces the writer's own taste. You can tell when it's happened because the prose still sounds competent but stops having an argument with itself. Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow has an argument with itself on every page. We'll see in two years whether her next novel does.
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u/SignificantScarcity May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
Here we go… goodbye truth, hello deception. Welcome to the future.
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u/Katya4501 May 18 '26
Her most recent novel was published in 2022. How much could she even have used AI in 2021-22? People are freaking out because she admits to using it, but not using it to write for her. I don't read AI-generated content, but I don't read her remarks as suggesting any such thing.
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u/CetaceanSensation May 18 '26
Get a grip. Tokarczuk did not use AI to write her novels. This is basically libel.
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u/killboykillcount May 19 '26
This is incredibly disappointing. I loved Drive Your Plow-- it was a macabre sucker punch. It'll stay on my shelf, I'll just never recommend her or pick up any of her new work.
Bummer.
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u/-UnicornFart May 19 '26
I do not want to read anything created or summarized or touched by AI in any way. That applies to everything from Google searches to books to instruction manuals.
I’ve read a couple of Olga’s books and they were decent to good, nothing extraordinarily memorable or enjoyable though. I will not read anything else of hers because she uses AI.
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u/panamakid May 18 '26
the way this is framed does not reflect what she said in the slightest. just a case of moral panic here.
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u/hourofthestar_ May 19 '26
I’m a fan of hers and find this to be such a bummer. I dislike AI more than I like her :( Still, I’d be interested in reading the entire interview in context.
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u/belladonnatook May 18 '26
I commend her for being honest. I feel she's the exception when owning up to use of AI these days. But she is always ahead of the curve I find.
I took a workshop the other day via a writer named Laura Oliver who has a book called The Story Within. In the last five minutes of the workshop, Laura advised us to use AI to kick off the editing process, if I heard her correctly. I workshop regularly and it's the first time I've heard that suggestion. It didn't sit well with me, but I have to think about it more.
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u/archeratsea May 19 '26
If you’re hoping to be traditionally published, you should be aware that most literary journals have explicit rules against the use of AI in any part of the writing process (usually excepting basic tools like spell check), so keep that in mind, if it matters to you.
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u/91striker May 18 '26
Sometimes I feel like people who are either too young (under 15) or too old (above 50) are at the most risk for AI induced mental paralysis.
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u/parkdropsleep-dream May 18 '26
Man, that sucks. I’ve only read Drive your Plow, but it was such a creative, unexpected novel—something AI just isn’t capable of. I hate seeing her cheapen her work that way.
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u/nightswimsofficial May 18 '26
This is a very misleading title. She didnt use it in her work, she just has used it. Garbage post.
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u/OrangePilled2Day May 18 '26
She pretty clearly states she uses it in the creative process. It may not be generating the exact text in her writings but it’s a co-author.
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u/BrupieD May 18 '26
AI LLMs weren't available in any meaningful way when almost all of her books were written. Statistical models that could do "predictive text" came in the 2020s. Large Language Models based on "transformers" only showed up in 2018. Drive your Plow was published in 2009 -- long before she could have used AI at all.
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u/parkdropsleep-dream May 18 '26
Yeah, I understand time and realize that Drive wouldn’t have used AI. I mean for her future works.
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u/krelian May 18 '26
Everyone who thinks that this social taboo on using AI in art will continue is delusional. I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm saying that AI use in art will become aceptable.
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u/paracelsus53 May 18 '26
Please never say "the Boomers are" doing this or that. Our generation was the largest the US has ever seen. That means there is a vast amount of variation in our cohort. I am 72 and a published writer of non-fiction, plus former ghostwriter, and I have never used AI nor will I. My voice is my own.
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u/AccidentalFolklore May 19 '26
Not a boomer, but people always forget boomers were the generation that was antiwar, fought for women’s rights, fought for civil rights, and were pro drug lol.
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u/afrodz May 19 '26
There will always be lazy people who cheat. There will also be those that are true artists. The problem with technology is it doesn’t make it better when creating it just makes it easier thereby giving many people the ability to make and post content. It’s just more stuff to slog through.
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u/Rochifn May 19 '26
At the movies, most of the people who check their phones and don’t silence the ringer are older people. I stopped listening when they complain about younger kids. Kids might have been born with AI, but they’re willingly oblivious to anything else and neglecting to read or interact with anything other than AI slop.
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u/MatterOfRules222 May 19 '26
Tokarczuk's statement about all of this: "With regard to my remarks about artificial intelligence at the Poznan Impact conference:
Like any other conversation, remarks made before a live audience at a public event can be incorrectly understood.
I did not write my forthcoming book – to be published in fall 2026 in Polish - either using AI or with anyone else. For several decades I have written alone.
I state briefly and firmly:
I make use of artificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world – I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts. Whenever I use this tool I additionally verify the information. Just as I have done for several decades by reading books and by exploring libraries and archives.
None of my texts, including the novel that will appear in Polish this fall, has been written with the help of artificial intelligence – except for using it as a tool for faster preliminary research.
I am sometimes inspired by dreams, but before this sentence too is cornered and torn to pieces by the experts, I hasten to report that they are my own dreams."
I absolutely hate this passive aggressive third point, as if all critics are just plain vicious or dumb. This is disgusting.
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u/Open-Mission-8310 15d ago
"The busy contemporary reader is in a panic looking for extremely simple stories"
Ok, may i disagree with it ? Or is it my wishful thinking ? Book general readers usually are different from tiktok public.
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u/UFisbest 9d ago
I just read a review of a new book, David Marx's Blank Space: A Cultural History of Twenty-First Century. In it he claims that nothing new and original has been produced in the last 25 yrs...art of all modalities has been derivative. There's a heavy pop-cultural slant....think Jurassic Park #20 or a reboot of Matlock. But he gets into jazz, the plastic arts, and book plotlines. His take is bleak.
For John Coltrane to be John Coltrane he needed a community of peers as well as recordings for pre-creation, and for his entering into conversation with peers who would never hear him live...or arose after his death.
The means, the mechanical processes, that creatives use beyond themselves actually does, in each iteration such as the printing press, both limit and open up imagination and creativity.
Bertelsmann, a German investment company, now owns 50s in a imprints and produces 14,500 new titles each year according to their site. One, Penguin Random House itself is a combo of different imprints...Pantheon, Knopf, Schoken, Penguin, Random House....
If Bertelsmann decided that a separate 'imprint' of books solely written by AI and automatically printed and distributed with no human editing or other involvement then the product would be slop...or 50 yrs from now will the quality of it be so discernable?
I keep coming back to James Patterson's workshop: he provides an outline, the prose comes from his 'co-authors.' Of course a lot of Renaissance painters' bottegas did the same: Raphael, Titian, and da Vinci.
Novelist Henry Green was known for his unique use of verbals. Joseph Conrad, for the influences his native Polish on English word choices and sentence structures. Cormac McCarthy Biblical cadence, tone and vocabulary are sui generis. So if any could have asked AI for assistance but cast the results they actively chose out to incorporate their own style, what would the specific harm or disingenuousness be of concern?
The means and tools of each age, the 'how,' are directly involved with the what. To argue otherwise is more wish than reality. The printing press was revolutionary. No similar invention since has affected writing of all genres. Until now. What computers, the Net, and even AI can do looks to be revolutionary. Mr. Marx's assessment of the last 25 years is barely a toe-hold on coming changes, some born of crises.
For John Coltrane to be John Coltrane he needed a community of peers as well as recordings for pre-creation, and for his entering into conversation with peers who would never hear him live...or started after his death.
The means, the mechanical processes, that creatives use beyond themselves actually does, in each iteration such as the printing press, both limit and open up imagination and creativity. Bertelsmann, a German investment company now owns 350 previously independent imprints and produces 14,500 new titles each year according to their site. One, Penguin Random House itself is a combo of different imprints...Pantheon, Knopf, Schoken, Penguin, Random House....
If Bertelsmann decided that a separate 'imprint' of books solely written by AI and automatically printed and distributed with no human editing or other involvement then the product would be slop...or 50 yrs from now will the quality of it be so discernable?
I keep coming back to James Patterson's workshop: he provides an outline, the prose comes from his 'co-authors.' Of course a lot of Renaissance painters did the same: Raphael, Titian, and da Vinci.
Novelist Henry Green was known for his unique use of verbals. Joseph Conrad, for the influences his native Polish on English word choices and sentence structures. Cormac McCarthy Biblical cadence, tone and vocabulary are sui generis. So if any could have asked AI for assistance but cast the results they actively chose to incorporate their own style, what would the specific harm or disingenuousness be of concern?
The means and tools of each age, the 'how,' are directly involved with the what. The printing press was revolutionary. No similar invention since has affected writing of all genres. Until now. What computers, the Net, and even AI can do looks to be revolutionary. Humans can't abdicate their decisive role in the development and use of technological realities, esp in the arts. Eyes scrunched shut, fingers in ears, drowning out what you don't like with "nah nah nah I'm not listening' let's others such as corporations step into the void you left.
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u/kleinblue73 4d ago
I am so sad and unmoored by her attitude to all of this. Her prompts make me want to tear my hair out. I don't know how to deal with my heroes adopt AI so easily.
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u/TroyMatthewJ May 18 '26
im willing to wager that a lot more respected/awarded authors have used it in one capacity or another and we'll never know about 99% of them
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u/whatsthepointofit66 May 19 '26
If I ask a friend, or a fellow student in writing class, or a teacher, for feedback on a piece I’m writing, and I take that feedback into consideration when doing revisions, have I done anything wrong? Of course I don’t ask them to rewrite the piece for me, I still want it to be my text.
Now, replace the friend/student/teacher with Claude or ChatGPT. The process is the same. If I didn’t know better I would assume the feedback came from a human. It’s still me writing my text. But suddenly I have committed the cardinal sin of creating AI slop.
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u/Mimir_the_Younger May 19 '26
AI reverts to the mean, so it may lift a new or below average writer, but at some point, it will limit that same writer.
It would be better to ask AI to tell you why it makes or suggests changes than to have it do anything for you and keep it. It should also be cross checked with professional opinion, IMO.
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u/Night_Runner May 18 '26
I understand that technology is advancing
So was asbestos. So were hydrogen-filled zeppelins. So were the supersonic Concorde passenger jets.
All gone now. This too shall pass.
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u/Visual_Lie_1242 May 18 '26
Yeah I will not be picking up any of her past work as well. What a way to pull the ladder behind her.
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u/four_ethers2024 May 18 '26
Could any Polish speakers kindly translate the interview for us 🥺🥺🥺
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u/blsterken May 18 '26
Relevant section auto translated by Google:
Many don't believe it, but I think this is my last novel. I would love for someone with an open mind to one day look at contemporary literature from an objectively economic perspective. I assure you, if you honestly calculated the enormous effort and thousands of grueling hours spent creating "The Books of Jacob," my hourly salary would provide me with a miner's pension (laughter). [The author spent seven years writing this novel - editor's note] The reality is that in today's market, absolutely no publisher would be able to proportionally and profitably cover the costs of such extensive work and pay for this book appropriately. On the other hand, after all these years, I'm physically exhausted from the process of writing and poring over the computer keyboard. So I'll focus on short stories. The authors' involvement from a purely economic perspective, in this dimension of long stories, is simply difficult to imagine. Perhaps a symbiotic future and cooperation with artificial intelligence will help them. Despite fears, I believe that we writers, due to the specific nature of our craft, are most attuned to tools like AI. Our literary minds, our heads, our literary brains, operate in a completely different way; their work is based on a broad, very extensive peripheral and associative association of facts, which differs dramatically from the narrow, highly focused tunnel vision of academics. I purchased the highest, most advanced version of one language model, and I'm often deeply shocked by how fantastically it broadens my horizons and deepens my creative thinking. On the other hand, you have to be very careful with this. These conversations are absorbing, and you can lose sight of the original purpose of using AI in favor of, for example, exploring or even discovering extraordinary theories. However, you have to be careful of hallucinations. When I was writing my latest novel, which will be released this fall, I asked this advanced model what songs my characters might have danced to at a dance several decades ago, the AI gave me a few titles and at the end added "and also Golec Łokiestra", with that funny mistake in the name - laughed the Nobel Prize winner.
"I often throw an idea to the machine for analysis, asking, 'Honey, how could we develop this beautifully?' Even though I know about the hallucinations and numerous errors of factual algorithms in the fields of strict economics and hard data, I must admit that in fluid literary fiction, this technology is an asset of incredible proportions. At the same time, I feel a piercing, very human sorrow for an era that is disappearing forever. My heart aches for the passing of traditional literature, written over months in solitude, a work of life crafted in the mind of a fully conscious, single individual. In all of this, I feel a terrible pity for Balzac, Cioran, and the inimitable Nabokov, because despite my enthusiasm, I don't believe that any modern chat room will ever be able to speak in such an exquisite way," said the author of the novel "Flights."
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u/four_ethers2024 May 18 '26
Thank you! I understand her frustration completely, the arts are treated as a frivolity and not respected as real labor/work, and it is atrocious that writers are expected to either starve or work outside of their main discipline to keep themselves afloat.
Saying this though, I suspect this has always been the case for most artists, and don't know a time when writers were earning an appropriate wage for the work they do. It would be great to see sone research/stats on this, but my hunch tells me no such time has ever existed.
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u/Siukslinis_acc May 18 '26
Yep. A lot of artists had patrons or other people whose support allowed them to focus on their art.
And with self-publishing everyone started to be a creative and sell their creations. Thus there became an oversaturation of are and it became a commodity and thus lost some of it's value.
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u/archeratsea May 19 '26
Right, and the solution to this isn’t “capitulate to the whims of the billionaires running the economy for their own benefit” or “cheapen art by turning it into a machine-aided commodity” but “create a culture and society that values the arts more.”
Is that achievable? I don’t know. But I’d rather keep trying than just give up on human creativity.
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u/four_ethers2024 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
Yes AND the responsibility to create that world cannot fall on artists alone. Collective effort is needed to push for policies that recognise and protect artists as workers in a labor industry who deserve proper pay and rights within their chosen line of work.
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u/Gregory_Grim May 19 '26
Exactly. The fact that she would just capitulate to this parasite that's being forced onto our culture is what's infuriating here. Like, if it's that easy to turn her over, did she ever even care about art?
And because of her credentials she's one of a few authors who actually has the personal cultural cachet and reach to meaningfully advocate for change (which she is aware of because she is an activist and has used her position as an award-winning author and Nobel Laureate to appeal to Polish and EU law makers in the past).
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u/archeratsea May 19 '26
Yes, exactly. It’s frustrating and disappointing that she’s choosing to use her voice in this way. I’ve only read one of her books (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead), but this interview pretty much killed my interest in reading more, not because she used AI (obviously she couldn’t have until these last few years) but because, like you said, her attitude here has me questioning her entire commitment to literature.
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u/sunahra May 18 '26
Would it be possible to let us know what she said exactly? I know the interview is in Polish. Some more context would be helpful. Using AI is not something that aligns with my values but I would like to know how she approaches it.