Ted Chiang
Science Fiction Writer
Multiple Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of Story of Your Life (filmed as Arrival). His New Yorker essays — “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” and “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” — are the most cited intellectual case against generative AI as a creative medium.
In his words
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation.
Using ChatGPT to write your essays is like bringing a forklift into the weight room.
Biography
Ted Chiang (born 1967) is an American science fiction writer whose small, meticulous body of work — the collections Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation — has won four Hugo and four Nebula awards. His novella “Story of Your Life” became the film Arrival (2016). Trained in computer science and long employed as a technical writer, he is that rare AI critic who understands the machinery he is criticizing.
The essayist the AI debate cannot ignore
Chiang’s February 2023 New Yorker essay “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” reframed large language models as lossy compression of the internet — an analogy so useful that even AI researchers adopted it. He followed in August 2024 with “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art,” arguing that art “is something that results from making a lot of choices,” and that delegating those choices to a model empties the work of intention.
It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where AI helps writers do good work.
Chiang’s critique is notable for what it is not: he files no lawsuits, signs few letters, and does not predict apocalypse. He simply argues, patiently and in public, that generative AI misunderstands what writing and art are for. His essays have drawn detailed rebuttals from technologists and philosophers — a mark of how seriously both sides take him.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/ted-chiang