Salman Rushdie Says, AI Is No Threat To Writers Until It Crafts Original Humor

While talking about Artificial Intelligence, Rushdie,77, said that authors are safe from AI until it can create a book that can make people laugh.

The author said that he had never tried AI and liked to pretend it didn't exist.

However, the problem with AI is that it cannot make its own jokes, according to Salman Rushdie. "It has no sense of humor – you don’t want to hear a joke told by ChatGPT. If there’s a moment when there’s a funny book written by ChatGPT I think we’re screwed."

Since his stabbing in the US which left him blind in the right eye, attending the Hay festival has been his most high-profile in-person appearance.

Rushdie said that he was glad that his attacker, Hadi Matar, 27, had been convicted of attempted murder and assault and was jailed for 25 years.

He said what had given him closure was writing about it in his book, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder.

The author further said that he is happy that he has a new fiction book coming out later this year and wrote that it "felt like coming home."

"Ever since the attack, really, the only thing anybody’s wanted to talk to me about is the attack. And I’m over it. "It will be nice to have stories to talk about," he mentioned.

"When I wanted to be a writer, it never occurred to me that I would write about myself. That seemed like the most uninteresting thing of all. "I wanted to make stuff up," he added.

During the festival, Rushdie said, the world was in an "orange moment," while speaking about Donald Trump.

He further said, "I don't know what to do with it - he was elected," and added, "So was Hitler, by the way."

In a world where people struggle to agree on truth, Rushdie said that stories and fables were even more important, and they could feel more real.

However, he shared that he didn't like books that tried to teach him something. Thus, he preferred ones he could inhabit.

After the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses, a fictional story inspired by the life of Islamic prophet Mohammad, in 1988, Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding due to the threats to his life.

The author was attacked on a New York lecture stage in August 2022. He was left with several injuries, including loss of vision in his right eye, liver damage, and a paralyzed hand due to the damage in nerves.