Literary Hub » Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel.

Update: On Tuesday afternoon, Tokarczuk sent a statement to Lit Hub via her publisher, Riverhead, denying she used AI in her writing for anything other than research. Read it here.

We also updated the text below to more accurately reflect the form of Tokarczuk’s remarks.

At a recent event in Poznań (covered in Polish), Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk apparently admitted to using AI in her creative process.

The writer Maks Sipowicz, who drew attention to the remarks on Bluesky, translated a few of the most salient bits: “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,” Tokarczuk told the interviewer. “Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’ Even though I know about hallucinations and many factual errors in the algorithms in terms of economics and hard data, I have to add that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion.”

Here’s a bit more, translated via Google Translate (the irony is not lost on me—in lieu of complaints, please send Lit Hub funding for staff translators):

The involvement of authors from a purely economic point of view, in this dimension of long stories, is simply difficult to imagine. 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 can be deeply shocked by how fantastically it expands my horizons and deepens my creative thinking.

Sure. Tokarczuk also claims her current project will be her last, as she believes readers are no longer interested in complex literary work. She does mourn for the old ways, she says, but seems to have accepted they’re gone for good. Wonder why…