TIME 100/AI: INNOVATORS

THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang

WRITER

TED CHIANG IS PERhaps the world's most celebrated living science-fiction author. His short, carefully hewn stories explore how our inner worlds and our societies would react to unexpected rifts in the fabric of science. How would it feel to receive a hormone injection that drastically improved your cognitive function? What if learning an alien language changed the way you perceived time? And if humanity were to create artificial life, what obligations would we owe it?

Recently, Chiang, 56, has stepped into a new role. In nonfiction pieces for the New Yorker, he has emerged as one of the sharpest critics of AI and the corporations behind it. In one viral piece, he compared ChatGPT to "a blurry jpeg of the web," arguing that the very technology that makes the app so fluent is the reason for its inability to separate truth from fiction. In another, he took aim at the structures of power that new AI advances both arose from and reinforce. Without structural economic changes, he argued, the rise of AI threatens to worsen wealth inequality, weaken worker power, and fortify a tech oligarchy. "What does progress even mean, if it doesn't include better lives for people who work?" he wrote. "What is the point of greater efficiency, if the money being saved isn't going anywhere except into shareholders' bank accounts?"