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Kochana, My Beloved, How Can We Make this Human?: How AI undermines the ethopoiesis of storytelling

Kochana, My Beloved, How Can We Make this Human?: How AI undermines the ethopoiesis of storytelling

By Hope Sneddon
She/Her

Hope is a queer writer and literary theorist who grew up on Awabakal Country in NSW. She has lived and studied in Austria and Switzerland before making her way back to Naarm, Melbourne. She holds a PhD from the School of Media and Communications at RMIT. When she isn’t writing, you can find her slinging books at her local bookstore, hiking and running in nature, and knitting.
instagram: @hopesneddonwrites

Edited by Max Levy
associate editor
he/him

Maximilian Levy is a Melbourne/Naarm-based writer of short-fiction and creative essays, a poet of questionable talent, and the founder, curator, and host of Folk ’N Words, a recurring poetry and folk music event based in Adelaide/Tarntyana. As an editor at Sprig Magazine, it brings him great joy to contribute to a publication that cultivates bold and meaningful articulation––written, curated, and read by patrons of literature and the arts, two of life's tremendous gifts.

Many academics and critics have tried to address the issue of AI use in literature, raising questions about authorship and authenticity, author-reader trust, and the overwhelming economic and cultural drain of outsourcing to AI. Yet such discussions omit a pertinent question: Why is it important for humans to tell stories in the first place?

Storytelling is ancient––at least as old as humanity––and produces novels, movies, poems, TV series, comics, and art. Storytelling also produces selfhood; identity. By creating collective histories, cultural narratives, belief systems, and ideals, storytelling helps us define and discover who we are. A recent scandal concerning Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk highlights the importance of keeping storytelling in human hands.

In a live interview during Poznań Impact, one of Poland’s largest annual multi-disciplinary business conferences, Tokarczuk suggested that “writing long stories is economically unprofitable today.”¹ When pressed further, Tokarczuk placed the blame on disengaged and disenfranchised readers who are “in a panic looking for extremely simple stories.”² Both statements ring true: it is hard to make a living as a writer, and we are battling low literacy rates and truncated attention spans across the globe. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, around 44% of Australian adults read at a literacy level of 1 to 2––considered low––with 4% reading below a level 1.³ Combating these concerning figures could involve higher government investment into the arts and education programs, and the development of policies that protect the jobs and livelihoods of creatives and teachers. Tokarczuk was so close. She laments the “very human sorrow for an era that is disappearing forever” while advocating for the technology bringing about that disappearance: “I must admit that in fluid literary fiction, [AI] is an asset of incredible proportions.”⁴ Tokarczuk’s support for AI provokes ongoing inquiry into the complex ethical dilemmas surrounding the impact of generative AI tools in the literary world. What does this mean for the future of storytelling?

Before delving further, I want to address the kind of AI Tokarczuk alludes to in her interview. Beyond LLMs and GenAI, artificial intelligence refers to a broad array of tools and products. As journalist and AI expert Karen Hao writes,: it is “a multitude of technologies that shape-shift and evolve, not merely based on technical merit but with the ideological drives of the people who create them and the winds of hype and commercialization.”⁵ Chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok are LLMs that utilise generative AI; they are trained on vast, incomprehensible datasets, most of which are collected from human-made artistic works, including literature, poems, blogs, social media captions, photographs, and audio recordings.. The creators of such material were not given the option to opt in or out of their work being used to train these models. Despite efforts to secure compensation for some affected creatives,⁶ technological advancements continue to outpace legislation. As Australian author Anna Funder points out, “The big tech companies are facing dozens of lawsuits [and are] lobbying governments [...] around the world to change the law so that what they have done[—infringing on copyright—]is not illegal. They have not succeeded,” yet.⁷

An LLM, in its most basic form, is a next-word predictor. Iterations of this algorithmic tool have existed since the advent of predictive text on smartphones. Generative AI generates text by drawing on input data to produce ‘new’ text. Texts generated by these tools are difficult to identify and create issues surrounding plagiarism and authenticity, eroding the trust of readers and publishers alike.

The rapid flux of AI development plays directly into the hands of its advocates and investors: as soon as you think you’ve pinned down the problem, the problem is headed by a new company, with a new name, another update, and a dramatically expanded dataset. AI tools have become so prevalent that they are almost inescapable––just look at Google’s new search function that has an AI agent embedded in the search function responses. The ubiquitous presence of AI ensures that anyone with a computer or smart device is unintentionally complicit, even if we have not consented to using AI––or to AI using us.

Since the Poznań interview, Tokarczuk has flip-flopped about her relationship with AI. In a statement issued by her publisher via Literary Hub, she explicitly denied using it to write, arguing that “remarks made before a live audience at a public event can be incorrectly understood.”⁸ She continued: “I did not write my forthcoming book – to be published in fall 2026 in Polish – either using AI or with anyone else.”⁹ She claims to use AI with “the same principles as most people in the world”, as a tool “that allows faster documenting and checking for facts,”––facts that she then verifies.¹⁰ At the end of her declaration, she offers a joke, referring to inspiration that comes from dreams: “[B]ut before this sentence too is cornered and torn to pieces by the experts, I hasten to report that they are my own dreams.” In clarifying her seemingly limited use of AI, Tokarczuk appears to contradict sentiments she displayed at Poznań Impact earlier this year: referring affectionately to her chosen AI model as “Kochana”, a Polish term for “darling” or “beloved”, she told her audience that she sometimes asks the machine, “how can we make this beautiful.”¹¹

Fellow Polish author, Wojciech Chmielarz, was shocked upon hearing that Tokarczuk had utilised AI in her writing process.¹² In a subsequent interview he offered the following distinction: “Using AI for research is one thing, but using it to plan and conceive a novel is [..] a breach of the unwritten contract with the reader.”¹³ He states, “We want to read books written solely by humans — and if they came about any other way, that should be clearly stated on the cover.”¹⁴ In our brave new world increasingly dominated by AI, the parameters for determining what constitutes ‘human-written’ literature and what doesn’t remain largely undefined. Ultimately, such a framework will require careful consideration going forward.

Professor Shannon Vallor, a researcher in the ethics concerning data and AI, asks us to consider: what we lose “when self-knowledge and self-determination yields to the predictive power of an opaque algorithm?”¹⁵ There isn’t a simple answer. Writing and publishing are often framed within an economic, capitalist framework, moulded by what sells best. If award-winning authors like Tokarczuk say they are struggling to see the economic viability of writing, then what hope do the rest of us have?

If we set aside the (very important) economic and industry factors for a moment, what we are left with is humans writing and reading stories in an attempt to share and understand their own experiences of selfhood and the world. As Timothy O’Leary argues, the act of writing and engaging with literature is unequivocally ethopoietic, helping us “detach ourselves from ourselves, to re-orient ourselves towards the world, and modify our ways of acting in the world.”¹⁶ So, if we surrender storytelling to the machines, we’re not just outsourcing labour but giving up the very ways in which we can know others and have “others come to know us.”¹⁷

The idea of writing as a practice of ethopoiesis has its roots in Ancient Greek philosophy; writing, or the act of creating (poiesis), can be seen as one way to produce ēthos––specific modes of being and behaviours. These translate into a set of ethics by which a person lives their life. Writing as a way of exploring the contours of subjectivity and our relationship with how ēthos is formed does not have to involve the pursuit of self betterment. Unlike later Judeo-Christian practices, Ancient Greek practices of ethopoiesis do not inherently problematise the self. Taking this Ancient Greek approach to writing, ethopoiesis does not always need to strive towards an end goal like publication—the production of selfhood does not always have to be a capitalist venture. Indeed, the bad poetry we write in our journals, our teenage diaries, the emails and letters we send, the birthday cards, and our shopping lists are all ethopoietic. Our shopping lists reveal the evolution of our tastes, our cultural heritage, and the foods we love and hate; in the same way, our teenage diaries reveal the different subjectivities we try on as we grow and change throughout our lives. Asking ChatGPT or Claude to perform these chores by generating these texts for us might, on the surface, offer a means to outsource menial tasks––but, in reality, what we give up is the control and production of our ēthos. At the moment, the erosion of ēthos through the use of generative AI is slow and measured. Small tiny pieces of our lives—like a story to tell our children, an assignment, a party invite—are handed over without so much as an afterthought to what it might lead to next. The implications of this surrendering to automation are not limited to how we constitute who we are, but also to what kinds of narratives we are allowed to tell about ourselves and each other.

Two leading critics, Vallor and Hao, have each compared our use of AI and algorithmic systems with “colonial-era patterns of resource extractions” and “empires that seize and extract resources that were not their own to exploit the labour of the people they subjugate.”¹⁸ In 2018, Internet Studies academic Safiya Umoja Noble raised the alarm with her groundbreaking book, Algorithms of Oppression, where she argues that “algorithmic oppression is not just a glitch in the system but, rather, is fundamental to the operating system of the web.”¹⁹ Her work on the racist and sexist algorithms that built the foundations of Google’s search engine exposed how ingrained societal biases were manifested online, perpetuating harmful stereotypes inflicted upon marginalised communities. Since the rise of AI, other academics and researchers have also raised concerns surrounding LLMs and generative AI and the tendency of such tools to disseminate prejudiced attitudes. Researchers Hofmann et al. were able to “demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded.”²⁰ Noble’s prophetic warning––that “artificial intelligence will become a major human rights issue in the twenty-first century”²¹––feels more pertinent than ever, emphasising the paramount importance of people writing their own narratives, using their own voices, and producing their own ēthoi.

The agency we have when writing our own stories is powerful and beautiful––not something we should give away so carelessly to a few billionaires. In producing our own ēthoi through writing and reading, we cultivate what Michel Foucault calls an “art of existence” that transforms “life into an oeuvre that carries certain” aesthetic values.²² These values, are made up of “voluntary actions by which [people] not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves into a singular being.”²³ Collectively, these values inform our socio-cultural landscapes, and influence our relationship with the self and ‘other’. Engaging in acts of ethopoiesis gives us opportunities to view our own subjectivity and its production “from a new vantage point, and in a clearer light.”²⁴ Human-made texts become ethopoietic artifacts that can inform new and different ways of being; something AI is incapable of doing.

Artificial intelligence will never replicate or exceed human creativity. Despite all the information it has consumed, it can never access, understand, or interpret the world as we do. In the same way a mirror can only produce a reflection, AI is merely an approximation of human speech, reflecting back what has already been written without any inherent human qualities. Vallor compares our current fascination with AI and its pretence of depth to the Ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who, beguiled by his own reflection in a pool of water, died happily staring at his own visage.²⁵ We are on the verge of following in Narcissus’ footsteps as we too, become ever more reliant and engrossed by AI tools.

Tokarczuk will probably not be the last author to throw the literary world into turmoil over AI. As Hao puts it, readers and writers need to find ways to “wrest back control of this technology’s future” and resist the AI industry’s narratives that obscure “the mounting social and environmental costs of this technology behind an elusive vision of progress.”²⁶

What is at stake here goes beyond the authorship of a text or a share of profit that shifts between publishers, authors, booksellers, and readers. More importantly, we face a crisis that threatens the fundamental ways in which we constitute and shape our selfhood, which in turn threatens our very way of life.

So, Kochana, my Beloved, how can we make this human?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Wiktor Cyrny, “Olga Tokarczuk zapowiada ostatnią powieść w karierze: „Pisanie długich opowieści jest dziś ekonomicznie nieopłacalne”,” My Company, n.d., accessed July 9, 2026, https://mycompanypolska.pl/artykul/olga-tokarczuk-zapowiada-ostatnia-powiesc-w-karierze-pisanie-dlugich-opowiesci-jest-dzis-ekonomicznie-nieoplacalne/20717?fbclid=PAb21jcAR5xGRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA81NjcwNjczNDMzNTI0MjcAAadBMSbAoS9Pp2DyjF8Fp-Tgqjq8YTp7iySGgmtYrSv37K0LZ2tVdtbNAdt-aA_aem_Mw9MBkCRx5VkZ4w9hqyMlQ.
2. Cyrny, “Olga Tokarczuk zapowiada ostatnią powieść w karierze: „Pisanie długich opowieści jest dziś ekonomicznie nieopłacalne”.”
3. “Literacy Levels in Australia,” Information Access Group, March 31, 2025, https://informationaccessgroup.com/literacy-levels-in-australia/.
4. Cyrny, “Olga Tokarczuk zapowiada ostatnią powieść w karierze: „Pisanie długich opowieści jest dziś ekonomicznie nieopłacalne”.”
5. Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless for Total Domination (Allen Lane, 2025), 15.
6. Anna Funder, “I Don’t Want a US Tech Bro as a Patron - Which Is Why Artists Must Defend Our Copyright in the Age of AI,” The Guardian, July 6, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/06/authors-writers-copyright-australia-ai-artificial-intelligence-anna-funder.
7. Funder, “I Don’t Want a US Tech Bro as a Patron - Which Is Why Artists Must Defend Our Copyright in the Age of AI”.
8. Olga Tokarczuk, “Olga Tokarczuk Has Responded to the Controversy over Her Reputed Use of AI.,” trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Literary Hub, May 19, 2026.
9. Tokarczuk, “Olga Tokarczuk Has Responded to the Controversy over Her Reputed Use of AI.”
10. Tokarczuk, “Olga Tokarczuk Has Responded to the Controversy over Her Reputed Use of AI.”
11. The original Polish text: “Kochana, jak mogłybyśmy to pięknie rozwinąć?”
12. Wojciech Chmielarz quoted in Gabriel Augustyn, “Tokarczuk vs AI: A Nobel Laureate and the Future of the Book,” Books Factory, June 9, 2026, https://booksfactory.pl/blog/tokarczuk-vs-ai-a-nobel-laureate-and-the-future-of-the-book/?lang=en.
13. Chmielarz quoted in Augustyn, “Tokarczuk vs AI: A Nobel Laureate and the Future of the Book.
14. Chmielarz quoted in Augustyn, “Tokarczuk vs AI: A Nobel Laureate and the Future of the Book.”
15. Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, 3.
16. Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011), 6.
17. Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, 56.
18. Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press USA, 2024), 75; Hao, Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless for Total Domination, 16.
19. Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York University Press, 2018), 10.
20. Valentin Hofmann et al., “AI Generates Covertly Racist Decisions about People Based on Their Dialect,” Nature 633 (n.d.): 147, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07856-5.
21. Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, 1.
22. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, ed. Robert Hurley (Vintage Books, 1990), 10-11.
23. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, 10-11.
24. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, 11.
25. Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking.
26. Hao, Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless for Total Domination, 19–20.