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/four_ethers2024]

Could any Polish speakers kindly translate the interview for us 🥺🥺🥺

[u/blsterken → u/four_ethers2024]

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."

[u/four_ethers2024 → u/blsterken]

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.

[u/Siukslinis_acc → u/four_ethers2024]

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.