Ted Chiang recently received the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
Alan Berner
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Alan Berner
Science fiction author Ted Chiang wishes he could write faster.
His entire body of work over the past 34 years fits almost entirely into two collections of short stories, and he says he feels the pressure many writers feel: to be more prolific.
“I can’t claim any moral high ground or deliberate strategy. It’s mostly that I’m a very slow writer,” Chiang said.
But each of his stories is carefully constructed, the fruit of big philosophical questions that gnaw at him for months, even years. And he is no stranger to success: his novel “Story of your life” was the basis of the film Arrival. Many of his works have won science fiction’s highest honors and awards.
Chiang recently added another prestigious award to this list. He is the recipient of this year’s PEN/Malamud Award, which celebrates “excellence in the short story.”
Chiang sat down with All things considered will host Scott Detrow to talk about his writing process, the philosophical ideas behind science fiction, and why he doesn’t think AI is capable of creating art.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” was the basis for the film Arrival.
Random Penguin House
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Random Penguin House
Interview Highlights
Scott Detrow: I want to start very broadly because I think a lot of your stories seem to ask big questions, whether it’s about how humans would behave when they encounter a disruptive new technology, or an alien race, or the physical presence of God. But then all the stories come back to the human reaction to this, as opposed to the existential problem itself. When you come up with these stories, do you start with the big question? Do you start with the character? Where does your mind usually drift first?
Ted Chiang: I usually start with what you would call “the big question.” I’m interested in philosophical questions, but I think thought experiments are often very abstract and can be somewhat difficult for people to engage in. What science fiction is good at is providing a way to dramatize thought experiments. The way this happens for me is that ideas come and go. But when an idea keeps coming to me over a period of time, months or sometimes years, it shows me that I should pay more attention to that idea, that that idea is eating away at me. The only way for me to really stop bothering myself is to write a story.
Détrow: Over the past year, you have published a series of articles in The New Yorker take a critical look at AI and often arguing that this is poorly phrased when popular culture talks about artificial intelligence (or) large language models like ChatGPT. What interests you about AI right now?
Chiang: As a science fiction writer, I have always had some interest in artificial intelligence. But as someone who studied computer science in college, I have always been acutely aware of the vast gulf between science fiction depictions of AI and the reality of AI. I think companies trying to sell you AI benefit from blurring this distinction. They want you to think they’re selling some sort of sci-fi vision of your super-useful robot butler. But the technology they have is radically different from what science fiction has traditionally depicted.
Détrow: In one of the essays that I think perhaps got the most attention, you argued that AI won’t make great art. Can you explain your thinking, your argument that ChatGPT probably won’t write a great novel or that DALL-E won’t create truly valuable foundational works of art?
Chiang: So, the principle of generative AI is that you, as a user, spend very little effort, and then you get a high-quality result. You can enter a short prompt and then get a long piece of text, like a short story or maybe a novel. Or you enter a short prompt and then you get a very detailed image, like a painting. You can’t specify much in a short text prompt. An artist must control all aspects of a painting. A writer must control every sentence in a novel. And you simply can’t control every sentence in a novel if all you’re given is a fairly short text prompt.
Détrow: Returning to your fiction work, I think many of your stories will feature a new innovation or scientific discovery that will only shake up the society it faces. Is it fair to say that, at least when we talk about generative AI, when we talk about AI in the current conversation, is it fair to say that you don’t consider it a revolutionary development?
Chiang: I think generative AI will have massive impacts, not because it is fundamentally a transformational tool, but because businesses will quickly adopt it as a way to reduce costs. And by the time they realize it’s not really effective, they may have destroyed entire industries. But in the meantime, they might have made a lot of money in the short term. And it costs thousands, if not millions, their jobs.
Détrow: There are these big societal changes in your pieces. But in many stories, the main character won’t necessarily change their identity much. Whatever massive change is happening, it just seems to confirm their sense of purpose or sense of identity. I’m wondering what you think about that, and if you think maybe that’s a takeaway from some of these stories.
Chiang: So, I would say that big technological changes often require us to rethink a lot of things, but they don’t automatically change our core values. If you loved your children before, you should continue to love them – there’s no technological advancement that will make you think, “Oh, actually, by loving my children, I guess I’ll give up on that idea.” » So, I wouldn’t say that the characters are unaffected or that they just stay the same. Rather, it’s about hoping that they find a way of living that allows them to be true to their core beliefs, to their core values, even in the face of a world that has changed in very unexpected ways.