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Salman Rushdie has declared that artificial intelligence has no role to play in literature, cinema or storytelling of any kind, dismissing the technology as fundamentally incapable of originality.
“Nothing. Zero,” Rushdie
tells Variety when asked what part AI should play in creative work. “It’s not useful to creative work because AI has no capacity for originality. What it can do is suck up enormous amounts of information and produce versions of that. But what it can’t do is something nobody’s done before. And that’s what art is, is to find things people haven’t done before. So, I mean I have less than zero interest in AI.”
The author made the comments prior to accepting Liberatum’s 14th Cultural Honorat a ceremony in London on July 8, in a wide-ranging conversation with Variety.
“Art at its best is a lot more than entertainment,” Rushdie says. “It’s challenging. And you challenge people, sometimes people don’t like it, but that is all the more reason for doing it.”
Rushdie also discussed the state of adaptations of his own novels, noting that little of his work has made it to the screen despite recurring industry interest. He points to “Midnight’s Children,” the 2012 film he adapted himself alongside director Deepa Mehta, as a rare exception he was satisfied with.
Rushdie says a previously announced television adaptation of “Midnight’s Children” with filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj did not move forward.
“Yeah, that fell apart,” Rushdie says. “For money reasons and, and script reasons, I think Netflix didn’t like the direction that the scripts took. It happens. A very talented filmmaker, just didn’t work out.”
Rushdie says there is renewed interest in a multi-episode television adaptation of “Midnight’s Children,” as well as separate interest in a film adaptation of his novel “The Ground Beneath Her Feet.”
“There are conversations around two or three of my books,” Rushdie says, “but believe it when you see it.”
Pushing back on the notion that great novels rarely translate into great films, Rushdie cites “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence” as adaptations he considers equal to their literary sources.
On upcoming projects, Rushdie discussed “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” the Alex Gibney-directed documentary based on his 2024 memoir “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Rushdie says the film is set for a U.K. premiere in early September, with a U.S. premiere around the same time and distribution deals across Europe and other territories.
Asked about a potential biopic of his life, Rushdie says, “I didn’t become a writer in order to write about myself. In fact, I think I’m the least interesting subject. But I became a writer to make things up.”
Rushdie says he is also at work on a new novel, though he declines to share details, calling it “early days.”
