At a May event in Poland, the novelist Olga Tokarczuk revealed that she had asked an A.I. chatbot to suggest songs the protagonists of her latest novel might have heard at a dance set decades ago. And her queries weren’t limited to questions of historical fact: “Often I just ask the machine, ‘Darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’” she continued. “In literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion.”
Tokarczuk’s comments ignited a firestorm among writers and readers aghast at a Nobel Prize-winner’s use of A.I. Tokarczuk’s statements were “laughably naive,” scoffed a piece in ArtReview. In her defense, the Polish columnist Wojciech Szot pointed out that Tokarczuk had merely “spoken out loud about what many creators are doing.”
Is that the case? A.I. use is undeniably rampant. Lonely men are turning to GirlfriendGPT to stroke their egos. A Wikipedia page for “deaths linked to chatbots” gets longer by the month. Seventy percent of high schoolers report asking bots for schoolwork help, and almost fifty percent of adults say they’ve used them, too. Universities and companies of all kinds are signing lucrative contracts for premium subscriptions. Still, to admit to relying on A.I. is to confess participation in a new technology that the American government is already using to identify targets in the war against Iran and to track immigrants at home — a technology that will have massive environmental costs, as data centers proliferate despite widespread local resistance.
While this technology is enfolded into economic, cultural, creative, and daily life at breakneck speed, we have an inkling that much of the discourse around its use is somewhat dishonest, or at least partial — justifiably concentrated on, or polarized by, the issue’s political implications. We’ve been eager to get the real story of how A.I. is beginning to change the ways those around us think, work, and operate. Has it helped them generate ideas? Edited their work or their emails? Or, conversely, is it being pushed on them by others, especially their employers? What are they seeing in their industries that they wouldn’t feel comfortable revealing under their own bylines? What are they embarrassed to admit, maybe even to themselves?
For this issue’s Dispatches section, we asked contributors — drawn from the worlds of tech, publishing, Hollywood, academia, journalism, medicine, and more — to tell us how they’re using, not using, or being forced to use A.I.
