Column: What Stephen King — and nearly everyone else — gets wrong about AI and the Luddites

He’s one of our greatest living genre authors, but that doesn’t make Stephen King an expert in the history of 19th century British textile worker revolts. Years later, as I was fumbling down the road to becoming a working writer, I found wisdom, and hope, in his nonfiction treatise “On Writing.” Which is why it pained me to see King mischaracterize a group that I’ve grown quite close to in recent the years — the Luddites — and to argue that it’s folly to resist technologies such as generative AI. “Generative AI programs are plagiarism machines and whatever you produce with them will be composed of other people’s copyrighted work,” the author Cole Haddon wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The point here is not to “well, actually” Stephen goddamned King, or to try to embarrass him, but to point out why it’s so important that we understand the distinction between the myth of the Luddites — ignoramuses who smashed machines because they didn’t understand them — and the true Luddites: skilled, proud cloth workers who understood all too well how machinery was being deployed against them, and fought back. In King’s piece, he lists two poets whose work the generative AI isn’t yet up to imitating; one is William Blake.