The anti-AI backlash is getting bad. Real bad.
The acclaimed author and Nobel Prize winner in literature Olga Tokarczuk is receiving blowback for comments she made during a recent interview in Poland.
Tokarrczuk reportedly said (machine translated), as reported by My Company Polska: “The reality is that in today’s market, absolutely no publisher would be able to proportionally and cost-effectively cover the costs of such extensive work and pay appropriately for this book. On the other hand, after years have passed, I am physically exhausted by the very process of typing and drooling at the computer keyboard. So I’ll focus more on the stories.The involvement of authors from a purely economic point of view, in this dimension of long stories, is simply difficult to imagine.
I bought myself the highest, advanced version of one language model and I am sometimes in deep shock at how fantastically it expands my horizons and deepens my creative thinking.
Olga Tokarczuk (via machine translation from the Polish)
“Perhaps a symbiotic future and collaboration with artificial intelligence will help them. Contrary to fears, I believe that we writers, due to the specific nature of our craft, will most quickly and closely engage with tools like AI. Our literary heads and minds operate in a completely different way; their work is based on a broad, very broad peripheral and associative association of facts, which is extremely different from the narrow, very focused tunnel thinking of academics.
“I bought myself the highest, advanced version of one language model and I am sometimes in deep shock at how fantastically it expands my horizons and deepens my creative thinking. On the other hand, you have to be very careful with it. Because these conversations are engaging and you can lose the original purpose of using AI in favor of, for example, learning and even discovering extraordinary theories. However, you have to be careful with hallucinations. When, while writing my latest novel, which will premiere this fall, I asked this advanced model what songs my characters might have danced to at a dance decades ago, AI suggested a few titles and at the end added ‘and Golec Łorkiestra,’ with that funny mistake in the name – laughed the Nobel Prize winner.”
The TImes of India reported backlash by others in response to her comments.
Through her publisher, Tokarczuk issued a statement to Lit Hub clarifying that she didn’t use AI to write her forthcoming novel. She used it for research purposes only.
It’s unfortunate that Tokarczuk felt compelled to issue this statement. But it appears any mention of AI by a book author, even a Nobel laureate and widely acclaimed author, is triggering.
More on Tokarczuk
The Nobel Foundation described Tokarczuk’s works: “Olga Tokarczuk is inspired by maps and a perspective from above, which tends to make her microcosmos a mirror of macrocosmos. She constructs her novels in a tension between cultural opposites: nature versus culture, reason versus madness, male versus female, home versus alienation. Her magnum opus so far is the historical novel Ksiegi Jakubowe (2014) (The Books of Jacob), portraying the 18th-century mystic and sect leader Jacob Frank. The work also gives us a remarkably rich panorama of an almost neglected chapter in European history.”
And here’s an interview with Dua Lipa: