Wednesday Links
A 2,000-year-old fragment of the “Iliad,” Spain’s crumbling castles, Evelyn Waugh’s “Sword of Honour” trilogy, and more.
Good morning! Did Olga Tokarczuk, who won the 2018 Noble Prize in Literature, use AI to help her write her latest novel? This is what she says in a recent interview: “When writing my latest novel . . . I asked this advanced model what kind of songs my protagonists would be listening to at a dance, a few dozen years ago, and AI gave me a few titles . . . Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’ Even though I know about hallucinations and many factual errors in the algorithms in terms of economics and hard data, I have to add that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion.”
After LitHub shared the remark, Tokarczuk released the following statement via her publisher: “I did not write my forthcoming book – to be published in fall 2026 in Polish – either using AI or with anyone else. For several decades I have written alone. . . . 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. . . . 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.”
LitHub also reports that Jamir Nazir’s short story “The Serpent in the Grove,” which won this year’s Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize and was published in Granta, was likely written by AI:
A set of judges chaired by award-winning novelist Louise Doughty appreciated the story’s “precise yet richly evocative” language, and selected the piece as a regional finalist from a whopping class of 7,806 entries across the board. But literary sleuths smelled a rat. . . . Off a hunch, Ethan Mollick ran the story through Pangram, a program that detects AI writing with 99% accuracy. . . . Pangram has an extremely low false positive rate. And “The Serpent in the Grove” came back with 100% red flags.
The award-winning author has also proven hard to locate in meatspace. Nazir’s bio identifies him as “a Trinidadian writer of East Indian heritage whose work explores the cultural intersections of the Caribbean and the Indian diaspora.” Four days ago, The Jamaica Observer reported that he is 61. But there is remarkably little else to his digital footprint.
NPR reports that New York magazine is investigating the critic and novelist Ross Barkan for plagiarism:
Barkan, who is a contract writer for the magazine, first attracted critical scrutiny when one of his stories earlier this week on the conservative influencer Ben Shapiro appeared to copy another piece on Shapiro published days before in The Washington Post.
When this was pointed out on social media, the magazine updated Barkan’s story to directly quote the Post writer, Drew Harwell, whose opening paragraphs Barkan lifted nearly wholesale.
After this, NPR found at least two other instances in which Barkan apparently pulled partial paragraphs from other stories that appeared in the publications the Intercept and Compact Magazine.
In other news, archaeologists in Egypt have found a papyrus fragment of the Iliad buried with a 2,000-year-old mummy: “It is the first time a literary work has been found playing a functional, spiritual role in the mummification process. And it suggests that for a Roman-era Egyptian, the Iliad — specifically some lines from Book 2’s ‘Catalogue of Ships’ — was perhaps as crucial for navigating the afterlife as a magical spell.”
