The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang – CDH@Princeton

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The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang

Humanities for AI

12 August 2025

Authors

Carrie Ruddick

CDH Team

Ted Chiang presenting his talk at Princeton. March 2025. (Photo: Ali Nugent)

This past year, the Center for Digital Humanities celebrated its tenth anniversary with the theme “Humanities for AI.” Through this series of events, projects, and conversations, we explore how humanistic values and approaches are crucial to developing, using, and interpreting the field of AI.<br>As part of this initiative, we were thrilled to welcome award-winning writer Ted Chiang to Princeton on March 18 to present his talk “The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art” with support from the AI Lab, Humanities Initiative, and Princeton Public Library. In this talk, he expanded on points from his essay “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” in The New Yorker (August 2024). To delve deeper into topics such as artistic self-expression and the role of choice, as well as the tension between art and commerce, we invited Chiang to respond to a set of questions related to AI and its impact on humanities scholarship.

What does Humanities for AI mean to you?

The goal of universities is to produce graduates who can be more than just workers at widget factories, and studying the humanities is an essential part of that. Capitalism's goal is to turn the entire world into a widget factory, and AI is a powerful tool for achieving that. So I see Humanities for AI as an attempt to wrest the technology from the hands of capitalism and find uses for it other than extracting economic value from people.

In your opinion, has speculative fiction influenced the rise of generative AI?

Not directly. What we think of as generative AI only started around 2020 with programs like GPT-3 and DALL-E, and it wasn't something that even people working in AI had anticipated; they simply discovered that their programs had some unexpected capabilities and decided to lean into them. While there have been science-fiction stories about machine-generated fiction and art in the past — some of which seem eerily prescient in retrospect — I don't think anyone working in AI was aware of them or drawing inspiration from them.<br>If we zoom out from generative AI to consider AI more broadly, then I'd say speculative fiction has had a big role. The idea of the singularity — a point in time when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence — was popularized by the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. Vinge had an enormous influence on the Extropian community in the 1990s, and that community influenced AI research in the 2000s. I think it's also important to note that it was a non-fiction essay of Vinge's that was most influential, rather than his fiction. The practice of presenting fictional scenarios as non-fiction has now become the norm in Silicon Valley.

Chiang visits Dr. Naydan's first-year seminar, "Speculative Fiction: From Pygmalion to ChatGPT." Spring 2025. (Photo: Carrie Ruddick)

It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where AI helps writers do good work.

Do you envision scenarios where AI positively influences creative writing? What conditions do such possibilities require?

It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where AI helps writers do good work. Writing involves very little overhead; it's not like making a movie, where your budget determines what possibilities are available to you. You can write with a pencil and paper and do pretty much the same work as with a typewriter or a word processor. When you write, your medium is sentences, and I don't know what it would look like to have a technology that gives you greater control over sentences. Because of that, writing is relatively unaffected by advances in technology. This is also why I don't think the word processor has had a significant impact on creative writing; whatever changes we've seen in the novel over the last fifty years have probably been due to other cultural factors. I've read the claim that novels have gotten longer because of word processing, but I think even that has more to do with shifts in the publishing industry than with the increased ease of typing.<br>There might be certain creative possibilities opened up by explicitly using LLMs to write about LLMs, but I don't see that becoming a widespread practice. There's a form of visual art called scanography, which relies on the effects made possible by digital scanners. Without intending any insult, I think it's fair to say that scanography is a niche genre. I'd say that generative AI has comparable potential for creative writing.

Using ChatGPT to write your essays is like bringing a forklift into the weight room.

What advice do you have for college students who face the prospect of using generative AI in their studies?

Everyone should think carefully about using generative AI simply because the...