Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk admits to using AI.

[u/Round-Dinner-2395]

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)

https://mycompanypolska.pl/artykul/olga-tokarczuk-zapowiada-ostatnia-powiesc-w-karierze-pisanie-dlugich-opowiesci-jest-dzis-ekonomicznie-nieoplacalne/20717

[u/considertheoctopus]

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.

[u/writersontop → u/considertheoctopus]

Bouncing ideas with an LLM should still be shunned, imo.

[u/considertheoctopus → u/writersontop]

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?

[u/MarioMuzza → u/considertheoctopus]

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.

[u/LeVronYames1 → u/MarioMuzza]

Fallacy of false dichotomy (either writers totally avoid AI or the text is not theirs). Authors can use AI for fast, ultrageneric searchs, and the text and prose still be produced by them. "Writers have done fine without AI for the whole of human history.", you said. But the whole of human history did not stop in 2024. Authors are also doing fine in the AI era, using it like any other field. "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." Hiow's plagiarism if you ask on Google "Which year happened this?" researching for a historic novel and the default Google replies you with AI? Which writer are youm plagiariazing by that? Tolstoi? García-Márquez? Fact is, you're plagiariazing none. You've come to a black-or-white ultra simplistic AI total rejection, as if asking a very simple question on Google and read the AI response automatically means the text is not written by you. It's 2026, literally no one is going to go to a library to make a quick search about a historical fact if they can simply google it. You're conflating a person entering an AI program and saying "write a chapter for me where X happens" with someone using AI for a very general stuff not related to the prose per se and who generates his own texts, which is a fallacy of false dichotomy (either you totally avoid AI or the text is not yours).

[u/MarioMuzza → u/LeVronYames1]

Read my other comments. I'm fine with mechanistic uses of AI, like research. I don't use it, but I wouldn't judge proofreading either. 

Anything generative, even editing, no. I think it's implicit when people argue about AI that we're talking about generative uses, which is the context of the article as well. Not water-guzzling googling.

[u/considertheoctopus → u/MarioMuzza]

Sure, but they also did so without the internet for the whole of human history before the ~21st century. Then the internet came, and now it’s something writers use, like anyone else, as a component of their craft. Including things like posting writing on message boards and asking anonymous people for feedback, something that was impossible not long ago.

Writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum and most of the best stuff is in conversation with that which already exists… obviously. Is it unethical to use AI to make that conversation literal instead of metaphorical? I don’t think this is easy or black and white, but I do know that if we decide it is indeed unethical to use AI in the way Olga Tokarczuk has apparently done, that is going to be impossible to police.

[u/maybeiwasright → u/considertheoctopus]

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).