Ken Liu is an American science fiction and fantasy writer whose prize-winning work includes the Silkpunk epic The Dandelion Dynasty and the short story collection The Paper Menagerie. He has won Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy awards and is also known for his English translation of the Chinese sci-fi trilogy by Liu Cixin that opens with The Three-Body Problem. Liu was born in Lanzhou in China’s northwest and moved to the US with his parents when he was 11. He has a bachelor’s degree in English literature as well as a law degree from Harvard University and worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer and litigation consultant before becoming a full-time writer.
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This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.
How has the development of artificial intelligence affected your own writing process and the creative industries in general?
Honestly, it’s too early to tell. The analogy I like to use is to think about past instances where disruptive technology became a part of the artistic process.
One example is the invention of the camera and all of the amazing things that we now do with it as a storytelling medium. Most people would not have been able to look at the earliest instances of photographs or motion pictures and imagine what these mediums would become today.
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That’s where AI is today. It will take years, perhaps even decades, for people to figure out how to work with AI as a medium and what new forms of art can be created.
