{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/why-olga-tokarczuk-is-wrong-about-ai-opinion-helen-charman/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":120886,"slug":"why-olga-tokarczuk-is-wrong-about-ai-opinion-helen-charman","title":"Why Olga Tokarczuk Is Wrong About AI","excerpt":"The Nobel Laureate’s recent comments on her use of AI in ‘preliminary research’ have hit a nerve – and rightly so","content":"\n

The Nobel Laureate’s recent comments on her use of AI in ‘preliminary research’ have hit a nerve – and rightly so, says Helen Charman

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Yesterday was a particularly bad day for writers and readers with concerns about artificial intelligence. First, claims circulated that ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ by Jamir Nazir, the Caribbean regional winner of the 2026 Granta Commonwealth Short Story Prize, was predominantly AI-generated: prize organisers said they ‘take these claims seriously and are committed to responding to them’, and while Nazir is said to deny using AI in this instance, Granta temporarily took the story down from its website. Then, comments made by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk attracted even more negative attention. Addressing Poznań Impact, one of the largest business, culture and technology congresses in Europe, Tokarczuk, who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, enthuses that AI ‘expands horizons’ and ‘develops creative thinking’, and can be, for writers, an ‘asset of incredible proportions’. She even admits to using it herself in order to ‘develop’ ideas: asking what songs her characters might listen to; calling it ‘honey’. She has since stated that she did not write her forthcoming book ‘either using AI or with anyone else’, but as a ‘tool for faster preliminary research’ – at which point the notion of what she exactly means by ‘writing’ begins to wobble.

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There are, of course, many reasons to be horrified by a prominent writer taking such a position. Even leaving aside the overwhelming environmental impact of AI’s energy consumption, borne unequally by the Global Majority, and the further enrichment of the billionaire class who already hold so much sway over political life, the infringement of copyright and the stripping of rights from writers whose works are being fed into LLMs without their consent is a live issue among authors and the organisations that represent them: in 2025, Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors protesting the pirating of their work. 

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Tokarczuk’s comments also raise questions about the encroachment of AI into what we might think of as literary fiction. As artificially generated slop threatens to flood the market, many responses to the interview note how particularly disappointing it is to hear such an endorsement from an author whose work is respected, experimental and decidedly noncommercial: The Books of Jacob, which was published in the UK in 2021 by Fitzcarraldo Editions, is over 900 pages long and took Jennifer Croft seven years to translate. For many, the encroachment of models like ChatGPT into the field of literary writing is particularly depressing in its transgression of the boundaries that separate artistic production from the manufacture of objects for the marketplace.

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Olga Tokarczuk at the Berlinale 2017. Photo: Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Reading Tokarczuk’s address in this context, it becomes clear that she does not disagree with those who understand AI to be antithetical to literary creativity. Sandwiched between her positive comments is the pronouncement that this is the end for ‘traditional literature’ as we know it, a loss she mourns both in a general context – no chatbot, she observes, can write like Balzac or Nabokov – and in a personal one: her next book, she announces, will be her last, an admission of defeat to a rapidly changing world. Readers, she says, have lost their appetite for longform narrative; readers of her longest novels now are content to stop midway and find out what happened in the end from ‘summaries’. The hypocrisy of such a complaint about the digital erosion of attention spans, given recent studies into the truly horrifying ‘cognitive debt’ of AI, is flagrant – and indicates a fundamental, maybe even wilful, misunderstanding of what reading and writing fiction is really for. 

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Further contradictions abound. Tokarczuk makes the point that the compensation for literary labour is far from fair. Of The Books of Jacob, she notes that if you were to convert the hours she spent writing the novel into the wage of a ‘manual worker’, no publisher would have been able to buy the book for a fair price. It’s true that writing, like almost all forms of creative endeavour, is almost impossible to sustain without private income, especially for those who publish work with independent presses who lack the financial resources of the conglomerates that dominate the industry. Yet AI is an immiserating force for writers, not a compensatory one: even notwithstanding the ongoing copyright disputes, it’s clear that the rapid devaluation of human labour, bankrolled by billionaires, is not a process likely to end in a fairer price for it. 

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Impact’26. Courtesy Impact CEE
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Tokarczuk’s profession of her hopes for a ‘symbiotic future’ of cooperation and mutual benefit between machine language models and writers is a familiar refrain from those who advocate for the benefits of working ‘with’ AI rather than against it in the creative industries. In the current economic landscape, this is either laughably naive or, more likely, a conscious decision to disguise profit as pragmatism. Anything is possible, of course, in theory. But in practice, it’s better to consider AI in the world as it currently exists. Poznań Impact, which is sponsored by Mastercard, describes itself as a ‘platform’ for the exchange of ideas: its ‘thematic tracks’ include ‘Digital Future’, ‘Financial Tech’, ‘Future of Defence’, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘Economics of AI’. This year’s speakers included Justin Trudeau, George Clooney, representatives from Uber, In Post and McDonald’s, as well as a brigadier general from the US Air Force. In such company, any attempted rehabilitation of AI begins to look like art-washing. 

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Read next AI Is Nothing Without Its Theatre

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