Stephen King does not forbid AI to train on his works, and is not afraid of neural networks
Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more capable, but Stephen King believes it still has a lot to learn before it can successfully imitate human creativity.
In his essay for The Atlantic, the writer says that he would not object to the use of his works for training artificial intelligence – he is not yet worried about the potential of the technology.
“Would I prohibit [teaching] (if that’s the right word) from teaching my stories to computers? No, not even if I could,” King said.
According to Stephen King, even human writers must become readers if they hope to write well. By loading the work of others into computers, or as he put it, “state-of-the-art digital blenders,” AI can be taught to create better works of art.
At present, AI creativity cannot match human mental abilities. Poems created by artificial intelligence are “good at first glance, not so good on closer inspection.” King believes that it makes no sense to prohibit programmers from using his works to train AI:
“I would be King Knut, who banned the tide. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by smashing a steam loom into pieces.”
Last month, more than 8,000 authors signed an open letter demanding compensation for the use of their works by artificial intelligence developers without their consent. The letter is addressed to Sam Altman (OpenAI), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), and others.
