In his words
There is no mind there! There is an incredibly powerful processing machine. Really impressive. … I’m just saying that there is no artificial awareness. We are no nearer to artificial awareness than we’ve ever been.
We do have the particular issue of which country is going to be the first to put an artificial intelligence in charge of their missile defence system. Because once somebody does that, then everybody else will have to.
Biography
Alan Moore (born 1953 in Northampton, England) is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the history of comics — author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and Swamp Thing — and, since retiring from the medium, a novelist (Jerusalem, and 2024’s The Great When, the first of his Long London quintet). A self-declared magician and famously uncompromising critic of the entertainment industry, he has disowned the film adaptations of his own work.
No mind in the machine
Moore’s AI skepticism long predates ChatGPT. In a 2017 World Literature Today interview he acknowledged the raw power of systems like DeepMind’s Go engine while rejecting any claim of intelligence: the machine “does not know that it has beaten a human Go master.” He dismissed Singularity and Skynet narratives as category errors about what these systems are.
By late 2024, promoting The Great When, his tone had darkened from dismissal to alarm. In a Radio New Zealand interview he argued that the danger is not machine consciousness but human recklessness — the race to wire unpredictable, error-prone systems into consequential infrastructure.
If these things that are capable of responding in microseconds, were suddenly in charge of all of the world’s nuclear arsenals, then no, I don’t think that the nuclear threat has receded.
Moore’s two-track critique — AI is not a mind, and it is dangerous precisely because we pretend it is — echoes across the writer-critic camp, from Ted Chiang to fellow comics legend Dave McKean, his longtime collaborator who has wrestled publicly with image generators.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/alan-moore