Stephen King has shared his thoughts on AI writing fiction, and they can probably be summed up best with the following phrase: "A certain dreadful fascination".
The horror author explored the topic of artificial intelligence – a key issue in the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike — in an essay published in The Atlantic. King was responding to the news that pirated copies of his books, along with the work of thousands of other authors, have been used to train AI models. This has been a growing issue in recent weeks, with authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay filling a lawsuit against ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, for the same reason in July. King, meanwhile – who is normally very outspoken about things he doesn't like – had a far more wearily resigned response.
"Creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient," the author wrote. "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.
"Does it make me nervous? Do I feel my territory encroached upon? Not yet, probably because I’ve reached a fairly advanced age."
King made it clear that he doesn't currently think AI is capable of creating work on a par with humans – "good at first glance, not so good upon close inspection," was how he described it – but he also seemed resigned to the fact that it might reach that stage one day.
Among the writing community, King's approach may be the exception rather than the rule. Alongside the lawsuit mentioned above, writers recently banded together to shut down Prosecraft, a site that used AI to analyse thousands of novels without permission.
