Salman Rushdie

Sir Salman Rushdie (born 1947 in Bombay) is one of the most celebrated — and most persecuted — novelists alive. Midnight’s Children won the 1981 Booker Prize and was twice voted the best Booker winner of all time; The Satanic Verses (1988) made him the target of a fatwa that shadowed his life for decades and culminated in a near-fatal stabbing on a New York lecture stage in 2022, recounted in his memoir Knife (2024). A former president of PEN America, he is among the world’s most prominent voices on free expression.

The 200-word experiment

In a March 2024 essay for the French literary journal La Nouvelle Revue Française, Rushdie described asking ChatGPT to produce 200 words in the style of Salman Rushdie. The result, he wrote, was “a bunch of nonsense” — text with “no originality” and “completely devoid of any sense of humor.” His verdict was amusement rather than alarm: no reader of a single page of his work could mistake the machine for the author.

But he did not entirely wave the technology away. Because “these creatures learn very quickly,” he argued, AI may genuinely threaten writing where originality matters less — thrillers, science fiction, and above all Hollywood screenwriting, where studios endlessly remake the same film. The danger, in his telling, is real but selective: it falls on the formulaic, not the singular.

What makes Rushdie distinctive in the AI debate is what he has not done. Despite his stature at PEN and the wave of author activism around him — the The Authors Guild litigation, open letters signed by thousands of writers — he has joined no lawsuit, signed no protest letter, and launched no campaign. His engagement with AI amounts to one wry essay: curiosity, a test, a shrug.