Olga Tokarczuk uses AI to drive over the bones of her own novels

 I have run into a persistant, and probably PR driven meme on social media that being against AI is "being against "art'" - like banning pianos or something.

The response to this is simple. Being against AI is being for preserving the internet tools we have that support art. AI is destroying the personal search, as well as creating pervasive counter-measures that we are now used to and should not be - like all those idiot popups making sure we are not robots - that in the glory days of this technology just didn't exist. The robots now do exist and they steal.

The recent comments of Olga Tokarczuk about how she used AI to find songs that her characters would dance to two decades ago shows either O.T. has never gone onto Youtube (ask for dance hits from the 80s or 90s - get a hundred to a thousand hits) or that she was really using it to write a scene about dancing and has smoothed out the features, here. The improvement in speed is negligible - unless of course the prompt was a bit more specific than this, a bit more about using AI to write the character.

She has denied this in a statement published on Lit Hub. It is a weirdly stated denial-snark thing that looks like she used AI to write it.

One of the great things about the Internet is that you can find, everywhere, vast banks of information. You can find all of the issues of the Partisan Review at Boston University, or all the issues of Dwight McDonalds Politics magazine with its brief run at Unz. I use the Internet Archive to trace, with unbelievable accuracy, such things as the career of the graphologist/psychic Rafael Scherman, for which I also used the French newspaper and magazine collection on Retronews, the various german colllections of newspapers Zefys, the Hamburger Zeitungen Digita, and the Austrian collection at https://anno.onb.ac.at/. I used Google Books, which is increasingly declining as a resource due to AI, to find hints and quotes - it is in this way I discovered the relationship between Scherman and the wife of Adolf Loos, the famous hater of ornament in architecture. At no point in this search did I need AI. AI's big negative, besides its tendency to fraud, is that it erases that margin of fun that makes searching a matter of discovery. For a writer of fiction, that margin is everything.

I should say that, as well, I use data platforms that are hooked up to academic institutions, like JSTOR, that are simply beautiful. But all this access is precisely what AI is aiming at. The end of the personal search is the goal of the AI tech lords, and with the end of the personal search comes the end of the democratic commons of the internet, period. It is not just that the search is speeded up and under the control of the machine instead of the person - it is that the ability to make a search, to use these resources, is under the gun as AI lords get richer and aim to monetize this freedom. Every AI prompt is another bullet shot at the personal search. It can only take so many hits.

I like Tokarczuk. I loved Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. Which has a strong love of nature behind it. That she now wants to drive her plow over the remaining forests of the world, accelerate climate change, and destroy our glorious research systems to use AI makes me suspect that she is - going down a dark path.