Low-quality AI slop is flooding the internet. But contrary to many of his peers in the literary world, Hugo and Nebula award-winning speculative fiction author Ken Liu does not find the idea of it “all that scary.”
The news: Speaking at Creative Destruction Lab’s Super Session Wednesday morning during Toronto Tech Week, the American software engineer-turned-science fiction writer weighed in on the topic as part of a series of discussions about the future tech may enable. Forget AI—Liu argued that humans already “live in a world of slop.”
From the source: The man behind The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and the Dandelion Dynasty series takes heart in how humanity has already responded to the introduction of photography—another technological disruption that enabled mass production, often with relatively minimal human input. “We have already survived a massive, massive change in our visual environment, and we have not lost appreciation for art, so I don’t think AI slop will transform that in any fundamental way.”
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Following the thread: AI has made it much easier to quickly produce images, videos, written content, and code. Liu said he is not averse to using AI to code, but he draws the line at asking AI to write stories for him, calling the idea “revolting.” Liu says that in software engineering, the coding is not the point, the application is, while in art, “the idea and the execution are synonymous.”
Final thought: Liu chalked up much of the consumer backlash to AI to machines now doing some of the work that used to give humans meaning. As Liu noted, fiction exists in part to help humans explore what it means to live a meaningful life. While AI appears to be getting better at producing it, the jury’s still out on how many of us are interested in actually engaging with it.
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Feature image courtesy Josh Scott for BetaKit.