Even Nobel Prize Winners are Using AI Now?!

AI is not inevitable. No matter how many corrupt tech bros or girlboss actresses tell you otherwise, the corruption of our culture and daily lives to the plagiarism machine is not something we have to roll over and accept. Seeing people you used to respect spew the company line has been bleak, and now we’re even losing the Nobel Prize-winning authors?!

Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk recently faced criticism after admitting that she used AI. Another writer, Maks Sipowicz, called it out on Bluesky and translated some of the more damning bits for English readers. Tocarczuk reportedly said: “When writing my latest novel… I asked this advanced model what kind of songs my protagonists would be listening to at a dance, a few dozen years ago, and AI gave me a few titles.” You need the water-guzzling robot for that? Figuring out those details is the fun part of writing fiction!

Tocarczuk added: “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 can be deeply shocked by how fantastically it expands my horizons and deepens my creative thinking.”

Nope. F**king nope.

After some pushback, Tocarczuk issued a statement to LitHub wherein she denied using AI to write her new book. Nope, she’s only using it for research.

I state briefly and firmly:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

Yeah, this still sucks? You literally have a Nobel Prize and you still have to justify using this slop? Oh, but it’s only for fact-checking and research? Because it’s notoriously so trustworthy on both fronts? Has it told you to eat any rocks yet or that suicide is an awesome idea? All these grand claims of AI “research” making life easier are pure laziness, and it doesn’t even fulfil that basic promise because you can’t trust a word it says. There have been so many reports over the past two years of people using ChatGPT and the like for basic tasks and it failing them, from not knowing flight times or whether or not you need VISAs for certain locations to misspelling people’s names to SO much more.

I hate this propaganda that tells us making art should be so frictionless that we needn’t bother contributing anything of ourselves to it. Humanity’s spent millennia making art. It’s one of the few things we figured out and have stuck with. Why would I ever feel incentivized to read a book if the author admitted that they sacrificed their innate curiosity to AI? Olga Tokarczuk was doing pretty well for decades before Sam Altman told us he couldn’t raise a baby without ChatGPT. I have no patience for this slippery slope of, oh, well, I just use it for this little thing. How many gallons of water is a sufficient sacrifice for your own stupidity? I’d say the Nobel committee should rescind her award, but they gave one of those things to Henry Kissinger so whatever.