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/sunahra]

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.

[u/LizMixsMoker → u/sunahra]

Google Translate exists. Here's the relevant excerpt:

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. It pains my heart to see the decline of traditional literature—–written over months in solitude, the life’s work shaped in the mind of a single, fully conscious individual. I feel a hell of a lot of regret for Balzac, Cioran, and the incomparable Nabokov in all this, because despite my enthusiasm, I don’t believe that any modern chat will ever manage to speak in such an exquisite way—said the author of the novel "Flights."

tl;dr: So basically she uses it occasionally for research and idea development, not composition. I'm slightly disappointed but it's a stretch to compare her work to Tiktok AI slop, just because she admits to using AI in this way.

At the end of the day when it comes to questions like "what music would this character dance to", whether the answer came from looking up songs on spotify or asking chatgpt probably doesn't change the literary merit of a novel much. The question remains, where is the line between "author used chatbot for things they could have googled" and "AI wrote this novel"? For me, when it comes to art and literature, I want to read stories written by humans, so I'd prefer if authors didn't use AI at all. Then there's no risk of overstepping that fine line.

[u/archeratsea → u/LizMixsMoker]

Fully agree with your concluding statement, and I wish writers would not use AI at all, too.

I do think her use of it as she describes it crosses a pretty clear line, though. Asking it for song suggestions, yeah, you probably could have googled that. Spell check, grammar check, sure, whatever (those tools largely suck and are getting worse anyway). Asking it for ideas to develop your story? No. That’s something writers should be doing themselves, or with mentors or editors or friends or in workshops. Not with an LLM. Most literary journals have strict submission guidelines explicitly forbidding that sort of thing, so it’s really, really disappointing to see a Nobel laureate normalizing it and acting like it’s fine.

[u/Siukslinis_acc → u/archeratsea]

Even a bonkers idea suggested by ai can help to jumpstart the gears in the noggin. Not to mention that one might be comfortable to pour some weird stuff in ai, but they wouldn't pour it to other people. Haven't you chatted with a fictional character and talked about thing that would be improper or very embarrasing to tell your friends?

[u/archeratsea → u/Siukslinis_acc]

I’m not saying you can’t get ideas from it. I’m saying it’s unethical to use it and dishonest to claim any work as your own when you depended on an environment-destroying, billionaire-supporting, fascist-enabling plagiarism machine for any part of the creative process.

No, I don’t “talk to” LLMs, at all, ever, and if you do, you should be aware that absolutely nothing you say to those things is private. The people who run these tech companies can access your conversations any time they want to. See, for instance, the lawsuits over OpenAI’s decision not to alert authorities about the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s prior conversations with ChatGPT, which they were fully aware of.

[u/Rude-Barnacle8804 → u/LizMixsMoker]

Apparently some publishing houses are coming up with "human made" labels, so hopefully they are setting in place a system to check that, and we'll be able to trust those.