Salman Rushdie has declared that artificial intelligence has no role to play in literature, cinema or storytelling of any kind, dismissing the technology as fundamentally incapable of originality.
“Nothing. Zero,” Rushdie tells Variety when asked what part AI should play in creative work. “It’s not useful to creative work because AI has no capacity for originality. What it can do is suck up enormous amounts of information and produce versions of that. But what it can’t do is something nobody’s done before. And that’s what art is, is to find things people haven’t done before. So, I mean I have less than zero interest in AI.”
The author made the comments prior to accepting Liberatum’s 14th Cultural Honor at a ceremony in London on July 8, in a wide-ranging conversation with Variety.
“Art at its best is a lot more than entertainment,” Rushdie says. “It’s challenging. And you challenge people, sometimes people don’t like it, but that is all the more reason for doing it.”
Rushdie also discussed the state of adaptations of his own novels, noting that little of his work has made it to the screen despite recurring industry interest. He points to “Midnight’s Children,” the 2012 film he adapted himself alongside director Deepa Mehta, as a rare exception he was satisfied with.
