“Nobel Laureate Used AI to Write Book”? Yes and No. Here’s What Actually Happened.

Ths week, Literary Hub dropped a headline guaranteed to make every internet writer clutch their figurative pearls: “Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel.”

I don’t think about that sentence too much but I will say this: the word “apparently” was doing a lot of heavy lifting. So was “write.”

Moments turned into hours. The news ricocheted through publishing Twitter and onto literary blogs. Posts with variations of “see, this is what AI is doing to literature” began firing across my timeline.

Except they were wrong. And if you read past clickbait framing, neither was the headline.

What You Don’t Know About the Nobel Laureate Who “Wrote” With AI

OK but what actually happened?

Tokarczuk did not use AI to write her novel. She used AI to assist with writing her novel.

In an interview published this week (in Polish), Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk confirms using an advanced language model to brainstorm certain elements of her writing process:

“I asked [the model] to help me with small, specific things. I needed song lyrics for a scene in which people are dancing…. And I needed to decide how to develop some passages. I asked the bot questions like ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’”

Tokarczuk notes the model hallucinates and gets facts wrong, but that asking it for ideas can help her think through solutions.

This is useful — but not the same thing as “using AI to write.”

Words Matter. Let’s Not Do This Again.

Using AI to write sounds like handing a prompt to ChatGPT and getting back a complete draft. It sounds effortless. Magical.

Writing with AI — it sounds like work. Collaboration. Hard thought solved with helpful tools.

The distinction isn’t trivial.

Writing isn’t the first profession to grapple with how we talk about incorporating AI into our workflows. As journalists and researchers reckon with copying baselines, we’ve gotten pretty good at talking about these issues. Terms like “augmented reporting” center the human in the loop and emphasize how new tools enhance (rather than replace) good practice.

The conversation about AI and writing needs those same guardrails.

What Olga Tokarczuk is actually describing is using a tool to do…well, useful work. Brainstorming. Research. Problem solving. Work that she would otherwise be paying someone to do.

“I see a symbiotic future for writers and AI,” Tokarczuk says. “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.”

She’s talking about the essence of good literary fiction writing — that magical human ability to make creative leaps, to find meaning where it’s not, to build cohesion out of chaos. Things that AI can’t do…yet.

That doesn’t mean AI can’t help us do those things better. Or more quickly. Or free us up to do them more often.

The Work Will Not Be Replaced by AI. But AI Can Make the Work…Work.

Look, I get it. We’re scared. AI is going to change our professions whether we like it or not, and there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about how that happens.

But using a tool to come up with song suggestions you’d Google anyway is not one of them.

The reason this story was such kindling for hysteria is that we know it’s true. AI is going to replace some portion of our work. But we don’t know how much.

A Nobel Prize winner approached that technology the same way we all might: with a clear sense of what AI can do, what it can’t, and where she draws the line between one and the other.

She’s not afraid to let AI tools assist with her work. But she’s never allowing them to replace the work itself.

So let’s stop replacing fair reporting about the former with clickbait about the latter.

My Headline About This Story

If I were queen of the world for a day, I would have titled this story:

“How Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk Uses AI as Part of Her Writing Process”

OK, so that would not have gotten many clicks. But at least it would have been true.

Please reach out and let me know your thoughts. Are you excited about how AI can help you do your job? Are you wary? Where do you see AI fitting into your work — or not?

We shouldn’t let headlines write this story for us.