Ted Chiang: The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

This event will not be live-streamed or recorded.

Presented in partnership with the Humanities Initiative "Media and Meaning" project and supported by the Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence (AI Lab) and the Princeton Public Library.

Ted Chiang's fiction has won four Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, six Locus Awards, and the PEN/Malamud Award and has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories. His first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. The New York Times chose his second collection, Exhalation, as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019. As a 2023 TIME100 Most Influential Person in AI, Chiang is described as “perhaps the world’s most celebrated living science-fiction author.” 

This event is part of “Humanities for AI” — a series of projects, initiatives, and conversations that centers humanities values and approaches in the development, use, and interpretation of the field broadly known as AI.

While the discourse around AI often prioritizes innovation and acceleration, a humanistic perspective highlights continuities, explores context, and fosters critical engagement with algorithms, systems, data, and tools. At a time when the scale of AI is increasingly large, a humanistic approach values attention to smaller scales and a more deliberate pace. Humanities for AI seeks to equalize our understanding of technology with an extensive, and user-friendly, understanding of traditional humanities research topics. Just as we are experts in introducing computational thinking to humanities researchers, we are now committed to introducing humanistic thinking to researchers in AI.

Learn more.