How Olga Tokarczuk’s AI Confession Made Me Rethink My Own Writing Process (2026)

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5 Things I Learned When a Nobel Winner Said ‘Beloved, How Could We Develop This?’ – Olga Tokarczuk AI

Seville, Spain. A tiny tapas bar near the cathedral. I’d just finished Flights for the second time, and I was still in that post-good-book fog where everything feels slightly dreamlike.

I was telling my friend Maria about Olga Tokarczuk’s writing – how she jumps between centuries and perspectives like it’s nothing, how her sentences feel alive. And Maria, who works in tech, hit me with a question I wasn’t ready for: “Isn’t she the Nobel winner who uses AI now?”

I laughed. No way. Not her.

But when I got back to my hotel room, I opened Google. And my stomach dropped.

Headlines everywhere. “Nobel Prize-Winning Author Uses AI Chatbot.” “Tokarczuk Calls AI ‘Beloved.’” “Literary World in Uproar.”

I felt sick. Here was an author I genuinely admired – someone who wrote massive, ambitious novels about history and souls and the mess of being human – and people were saying she’d handed her keyboard to a robot?

My stupid mistake? I believed the headlines without reading the original source. I got angry. I almost wrote her off completely.

Then I spent the next three days digging through Polish interviews, translations, and her actual statements. What I found was way messier – and way more interesting – than any clickbait article let on.

Here’s what actually happened, who Olga Tokarczuk is, why she won the Nobel, and why that so-called “horror story” of hers might be the perfect book to understand this whole AI mess.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Olga Tokarczuk uses AI for research and brainstorming – not for writing her actual sentences. She’s crystal clear about this.
• She addresses her AI chatbot as “kochana” (Polish for “beloved”) – which is weird, yes, but also kind of honest about how we actually talk to these tools.
• Her most famous book is a tie between Flights and The Books of Jacob, depending who you ask. Flights won the Man Booker. Jacob is her thousand-page magnum opus.
• She won the Nobel Prize for “narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” That’s the official citation. It matters.
• The “horror story” people ask about is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – a murder mystery that’s also a dark fable about sanity, animals, and revenge.

WHO IS OLGA TOKARCZUK? (AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?)

Let me start with the basics, because before this AI firestorm, a lot of English readers didn’t know her name.

Olga Tokarczuk was born in 1962 in Sulechów, Poland. She studied clinical psychology at the University of Warsaw – and that training never left her writing. You can feel it in how she dissects human behavior, how she gets inside broken minds without flinching.

She started as a poet in 1989, then wrote her first novel The Journey of the Book-People in 1993. But her breakthrough came in 1996 with Primeval and Other Times, a saga about a mythical Polish village across eighty years of the twentieth century.

Here’s what I love about her: she doesn’t write straightforward novels. She writes what she calls “constellation novels” – fragmented, collage-like narratives that jump between genres and centuries. House of Day, House of Night is like that. Flights is like that. The Books of Jacob is like that, but stretched over nine hundred pages.

She’s won Poland’s top literary prize, the Nike Award, multiple times. Her books have been translated into nearly forty languages. She’s a big deal in Europe. And after 2018, she became a big deal everywhere else.

WHAT IS OLGA TOKARCZUK’S MOST FAMOUS BOOK?

Depends who you ask. Let me break it down without the usual pretentious nonsense.

For English readers: Flights (translated by Jennifer Croft) is probably her most famous. It won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. It’s a fragmented novel about travel, bodies, and motion – part fiction, part essay, part meditation. It’s brilliant. It’s also not an easy read. You have to let go of wanting a traditional plot.

For Polish readers: The Books of Jacob is her magnum opus. Nine hundred pages about an eighteenth-century Jewish mystic named Jacob Frank who tried to unite Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It took seven years to translate into English. It’s massive. It’s exhausting. It’s worth it.

The crowd favorite: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead keeps showing up on best-of lists. It’s shorter, weirder, and more accessible – a murder mystery narrated by an elderly woman who loves astrology and hates hunting.

If you’ve never read her and want to start, I’d pick Drive Your Plow. It gives you her voice without requiring a thousand-page commitment. If you finish that and want more, Flights is next. Then block off a month for The Books of Jacob.

WHY DID OLGA TOKARCZUK GET THE NOBEL PRIZE?

This matters for the AI conversation. Bear with me.

The Swedish Academy awarded her the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature (announced in 2019 because of a scandal inside the Academy). The official citation was: “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.

That’s not just fancy language. It’s the key to everything she does.

Tokarczuk’s writing doesn’t respect borders. Not national borders, not genre borders, not the border between sanity and madness. Her novels leap between centuries. They mix history with myth. They give voice to people who’ve been forgotten or silenced.

The Academy also said she “resists moral judgement” and refuses to “represent the conscience of the nation”. In a country like Poland, with its complicated history and intense national identity, that’s a bold stance.

She writes from the margins. From the cracks between things. From the weird, uncomfortable in-between spaces that most of us try to ignore.

Which makes her AI comments so fascinating. Because she sees boundaries as things to cross. And for her, AI is just another boundary to cross.

THE OLGA TOKARCZUK HORROR STORY (IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK)

Every week, someone searches for “Olga Tokarczuk horror story” expecting some creepy anecdote or scandal.

There isn’t one.

But there is a novel of hers that people call disturbing, grotesque, and deeply unsettling. That’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – and yes, the title alone should tell you what kind of ride you’re in for.

Here’s the setup: an elderly woman named Janina Duszejko lives alone in a remote Polish village near the Czech border. She loves William Blake (the title is a quote from him) and astrology. She hates hunting with a burning passion.

Then people in the village start dying. Strange deaths. Suspicious deaths. And Janina – who the police dismiss as a crazy old woman – starts connecting the dots to the local hunters.

The “horror” isn’t jump scares or gore (though there’s some of that). It’s the slow, creeping realization that the narrator might be completely insane. Or completely right. Or both.

One reader described it as “really warped, mysterious, disturbing, distorting” – like Agatha Christie crossed with the Brothers Grimm. Another called it “a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness”.

I read it in two nights. Couldn’t sleep after. Not because I was scared. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about whether Janina was a hero or a monster.

That’s Tokarczuk’s real horror trick. She makes you question who’s telling the truth. Including yourself.

WHAT DID TOKARCZUK ACTUALLY SAY ABOUT AI?

Okay. This is where things get messy. And where my initial anger turned into something more complicated.

In May 2026, Tokarczuk spoke at the Impact conference in Poznań, Poland. She made several remarks that journalists picked up and amplified.

Here’s what she actually said – based on multiple translations and her own later clarification:

• She purchased “the highest, advanced version of one language model” and was “in deep shock, looking at how fantastically it expands horizons and deepens creative thinking”.
• She sometimes asks the AI: “Beloved, how could we beautifully develop this?” (“Kochana” in Polish – which is intimate, affectionate, and made people lose their minds.)
• She asked the AI what songs her characters would have listened to at a dance decades ago, and it gave her titles – one of which had an error.
• She said that “in fluid literary fiction, this technology is an asset of truly unbelievable proportions”.

That last quote is what exploded. People read “asset of unbelievable proportions” and assumed she was ghostwriting with ChatGPT.

But here’s what she said immediately after the backlash – posted clearly on social media:

“None of my texts, including the novel that will appear in Polish this fall, has been written with the help of artificial intelligence – except for using it as a tool for faster preliminary research. I make use of artificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world – I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts. Whenever I use this tool, I additionally verify the information. Just as I have done for several decades by reading books and by exploring libraries and archives.”

She also added, with clear sarcasm: “I am sometimes inspired by dreams. But before this sentence gets twisted by commentators, I hasten to say that these are my own dreams”.

THE TABLE: WHAT TOKARCZUK USES AI FOR (VS. WHAT SHE DOESN’T)

Let me put this in plain numbers.

Task	Does She Use AI?	What She Actually Does
Generating prose or dialogue	NO	Writes every sentence herself. Insists she’s written alone for decades.
Fact-checking and documentation	YES	Uses AI to verify details faster than manual library research. Double-checks everything afterward.
Character research (e.g., period-appropriate music)	YES	Asks AI for suggestions. Verifies because she knows AI makes mistakes.
Brainstorming plot developments	YES (sometimes)	The “beloved, how could we develop this” remark suggests she uses AI as a creative sparring partner.
Final manuscript	NO	“None of my texts have been written with the help of AI.” Her words, not mine.

The gray area is the brainstorming part. If you’re asking AI “how could we develop this beautifully,” aren’t you outsourcing some of the creative work?

Tokarczuk would say no. She’d say the AI is a mirror – a way to see her own ideas from a different angle. Like talking to a friend who asks annoying but useful questions.

I’m not sure I buy that entirely. But I also can’t pretend I’ve never asked ChatGPT for a second opinion on a sentence.

THE BACKLASH (AND WHY I CHANGED MY MIND)

The literary internet went nuclear.

Some critics said she should be stripped of her Nobel Prize. One journalist accused her of “AI psychosis”. Another wrote: “Why would I ever feel incentivized to read a book if the author admitted that they sacrificed their innate curiosity to AI?”

I felt that way initially. For about six hours.

Then I read what she actually said. And I realized the outrage was mostly based on headlines, not her actual words.

She never claimed AI wrote her novels. She never said she was replacing her own imagination. She said she uses a tool for research and occasional brainstorming – the same way she used libraries and archives before.

That’s the part that hit me.

I write for a living. I research constantly. And I’ve definitely used AI to check facts, find sources, or bounce around ideas. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve probably asked AI “how could I phrase this better” more times than I want to admit.

So why was I judging her for doing the same thing?

Because she’s a Nobel winner. We expect them to be purists. To grind through libraries and archives and handwritten drafts. To suffer for their art.

But Tokarczuk has always been a boundary-crosser. Why would she stop at technology?

My Honest Review of Tokarczuk's AI Approach

User Interface ★★★★★

Her approach to AI is refreshingly casual. She’s not apologetic or defensive – she just uses the tool and moves on. That confidence makes me trust her more, not less. The “beloved” thing is weird but also weirdly honest. We’ve all personified our tech. She just said it out loud. ✔️

Speed & Accuracy ★★★★☆

Tokarczuk explicitly warns that AI makes factual errors. She flagged one instance where the chatbot gave her a wrong song title. Four stars because she’s aware of the limitations and verifies everything – but the fact that errors exist at all in a paid premium model is worth noting. ❌

Value for Money ★★★★☆

She paid for the most advanced version of a language model. No clue what that costs, but if it saves her hundreds of hours of manual research on a thousand-page novel? Worth it. The backlash cost her reputation points, though. That’s not a price tag you can calculate. ✔️

FAQ — Real Questions People Are Actually Searching

Did Olga Tokarczuk use AI to write her Nobel Prize-winning books?

No. She won the Nobel in 2018 – years before generative AI tools like ChatGPT were publicly available. The books that made her famous (Flights, The Books of Jacob, Drive Your Plow) were written entirely by her.

Is she using AI for her upcoming novel?

For research and fact-checking only. She’s stated repeatedly that none of her texts, including the novel coming out this fall, were written with AI assistance beyond using it as a “tool for faster preliminary research.”

What does she mean by calling AI “beloved” in Polish?

“Kochana” is an affectionate term – like “darling” or “dear.” She’s not in love with the machine. She’s using intimate language the way you might talk to a pet or a close friend. It’s weird, but it’s also honest about how we actually interact with AI.

What’s the “horror story” everyone asks about?

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – a murder mystery set in a remote Polish village, narrated by an elderly woman who might be a genius or might be completely unhinged. It’s disturbing, grotesque, and unforgettable.

Should I stop reading Tokarczuk because she uses AI?

I don’t think so. Judge her by the quality of her writing, not her research methods. If you read her books and feel the human connection, that’s what matters. If you can’t shake the feeling that AI contaminated the work, that’s a personal call. I came down on the side of still reading her.

Which Tokarczuk book should I read first?

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. It’s short, weird, and gives you her voice without the thousand-page commitment. Then Flights. Then The Books of Jacob if you’re feeling ambitious.

Did the AI controversy hurt her reputation?

In the short term, yes. Some readers and critics were furious. But Tokarczuk has weathered controversies before – she’s been called an elitist, a nationalist, and worse by different sides of the Polish cultural debate. She’s still standing. I suspect this will blow over once people actually read what she said.

CONCLUSION

Here’s where I landed after three days of digging through Polish conference transcripts, English translations, and my own conflicted feelings.

Olga Tokarczuk is not an AI writer. She’s a human writer who uses an AI tool the same way she once used an index card or a library catalog – to find information faster and see her own ideas more clearly.

The “beloved” thing is weird. I’m not going to pretend it’s not. But weird is kind of her brand. She writes novels that break every rule. Why wouldn’t she break the rules of how writers are supposed to research?

I made a stupid mistake. I believed the headlines instead of the source. Now I read her clarification, and I believe her. She’s been writing alone for decades. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is the internet’s ability to take a nuanced comment, strip it of context, and turn it into a moral panic.

So here’s my straightforward method for you: read her actual words before you judge. Then read Drive Your Plow. Then decide for yourself whether the AI thing matters.

I still admire her. Probably more now than before. Because she’s not pretending to be a purist. She’s just doing what works – and being honest about it.

That’s rare. In writers and in humans.