How Art has always been stolen, borrowed, and co-written

The myth of the solitary genius is once again under overwhelming attack. In the current era, generative artificial intelligence threatens to automate human creativity and upend the publishing industry.  We are almost encountering a collective existential panic due to AI. We worry that the soul is being drained from literature. Yet, history suggests that authors have always used ghosts in the machine to get the job done. Long before silicon-based language models arrived, writers were already outsourcing, plagiarizing, and quietly collaborating with uncredited assistants. We can see that the boundary of true authorship has always been incredibly unreliable.

In early 2026, the literary world exploded in a debate when Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel laureate in Literature, admitted that she paid for a premium artificial intelligence model to help expand her ccreative insights. The acclaimed Polish novelist confessed that she occasionally asked the chatbot questions like,

“Beloved, how could we beautifully develop this?”

The public reaction was swift with some online commentators hysterically demanding she be stripped of her Nobel Prize. Tokarczuk quickly clarified that she did not use AI to physically write her manuscripts. She further affirm that she relied on it only for preliminary research and brainstorming. (asking what popular songs her characters might dance to in a historical setting). This incident reflects a modern anxiety.

If an AI can suggest the metaphors, draft the outlines and organize the narrative then what is remained of the human artist?

If we are tempted to view AI as an unprecedented threat to artistic integrity then we must look back at the manual plagiarism of past literary geniuses. The legendary German playwright Bertolt Brecht who’s still celebrated for revolutionizing modern theater. He was basically a master of corporate-style intellectual property theft. Brecht operated a literary workshop. It was a revolving door of under-credited female collaborators notably Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, and Ruth Berlau did the actual writing. Margarete Steffin was highly instrumental in drafting legendary plays like Mother Courage and Her Children and Life of Galileo. Even then, her name was largely erased from the credits. Elisabeth Hauptmann reportedly wrote up to 80% of the celebrated text for The Threepenny Opera. Even then, Brecht took the royalties and the fame. Brecht’s genius was not necessarily in his solitary writing. In fact, it was majorly about his ability to direct and claim ownership over a collective ooucome.

Brecht is far from an isolated case. History is littered with famous men who built their legends on the uncredited backs of others. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously lifted entire passages directly from his wife Zelda’s personal diaries. He did so in order to flesh out his novels, including The Beautiful and Damned. He later legally restricted her from publishing her own autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz.  He wanted to reserve those same life details for his own book, Tender Is the Night. In late-19th-century France, the critic Henry Gauthier-Villars (known as Willy) locked his young wife, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, in a room to write. He published her highly successful Claudine novels entirely under his own name, pocketing the fortune while she remained invisible. (Colette eventually divorced him and reclaimed her identity as one of France’s greatest authors). The famous sci-fi pioneer was sued by Canadian teacher Florence Deeks. It was argued that Wells’s massive non-fiction work The Outline of History was plagiarized from her submitted, unpublished manuscript. Though she lost the court case, still identical historical errors in both texts suggest Wells had copied her work.

We can say that the co-writer is a disenfranchised wife in a 19th-century study. It can be a group of brilliant assistants in Weimar Germany. It can also be a language model running on servers in 2026. However, the fundamental controversy remains the same. Art has rarely been a purely isolated endeavor. The invasion of AI does not invent the concept of cheating or lazy delegation. Rather, it holds a mirror up to a historical reality we have always tried to ignore. Human creativity has always relied on hidden, uncredited helping hands.