Question: When is it OK to use artificial intelligence (AI) to write something?
Answer: Never – unless you want your work to be seriously discredited, if not rejected.
Writers generally know this. Teachers at every level warn their students not to do it and have become quite good at spotting it when it happens. Established professional writers simply know better.
So, it was surprising to discover a situation this week in which a Nobel Laureate in Literature said in a live interview in front of an audience that she has used AI in her writing.
Olga Tokarczuk of Poland won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2018 for what the judges described as “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
In her interview this week, discussing a new book on which she is working, Tokarczuk said, she has purchased “the highest advanced version” of a chatbot computer program that produces text; in other words, a high-end AI system. She added that she sometimes addresses the machine as “kochana,” which is Polish for beloved or darling. “Often, I just ask the machine, ‘Darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’”
In another example, she said she asked her AI “what kind of songs my protagonists would be listening to at a dance” about 25 years ago.
In a follow-up statement a day after Literary Hub wrote about the situation on its website, she said she did not write her upcoming book using AI.
She added that she uses AI only to document or check facts, and that when she does so, she always verifies the information.
In connection with the songs she was researching, she could get a pass for that – if she wanted only the names of some songs and then verified those names through a non-AI source. But she said in the interview that she asked AI “what kind of songs,” which suggests a more descriptive response being sought, and that’s not OK if she used any of it in her book.
The other example, asking AI how to develop a specific situation, is just wrong if she used any of what AI had to say. But if she was not at least considering using it somehow, why would she have asked?
Tokarczuk concluded her follow-up statement this way: “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.”
Nice touch. But content produced by AI – other than basic facts that also have been cross-checked – is not for writers. Period.
Footnote: Literary Hub had a sizeable headline on its article about this situation: “Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel.”
The language strongly suggests that she used AI to write at least significant portions of her book, if not the entire book.
Almost certainly misleading, which puts it in the same league as using AI in writing.
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