King, however, doesn’t seem like he wants to fight the rising AI tide, saying, “creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient. If that is true now or in the future, then creativity might be possible. I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination. Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.”
What does Stephen King think about AI writing fiction?
Answer: It has “a certain dreadful fascination.”
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The popular horror author Stephen King recently aired his thoughts on AI in an essay in The Atlantic, and he’s approaching it with “a certain dreadful fascination.” The essay was in response to news that King’s books were among the many, many works being used to train AI models, something that a number of authors have taken issue with even to the point of filing lawsuits.
King, however, doesn’t seem like he wants to fight the rising AI tide, saying, “creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient. If that is true now or in the future, then creativity might be possible. I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination. Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.”
King did acknowledge that he may also just be too old to worry about it: “Does it make me nervous? Do I feel my territory encroached upon? Not yet, probably because I’ve reached a fairly advanced age.”
King, however, doesn’t seem like he wants to fight the rising AI tide, saying, “creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient. If that is true now or in the future, then creativity might be possible. I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination. Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.”
