Salman Rushdie reveals moment he thinks writers will be ‘screwed’ by AI

Salman Rushdie has pinpointed the moment authors should start worrying about AI.

Speaking at the 2025 Hay Festival, which has partnered with The Independent for a second year, Rushdie said he likes to pretend artificial intelligence doesn’t exist, and admitted he has “never tried” using it.

The 77-year-old Indian-born British-American novelist, who is promoting his new short story collection The Eleventh Hour, said AI has one big problem – that it can’t make good jokes.

“It has no sense of humour – you don’t want to hear a joke told by ChatGPT,” he said. “If there’s a moment when there’s a funny book written by ChatGPT I think we’re screwed.”

The event was Rushdie’s most high-profile in-person appearance in the UK since he was stabbed on stage in the US in 2022. Numerous police officers and sniffer dogs were present at the Hay talk, with thorough bag checks also taking place.

Rushdie was stabbed around 12 times at the Chautauqua Institution in New York after a man rushed onto the stage. The attack left him blind in one eye, and he wrote about the experience in his 2024 book Knife.

Hadi Matar, 27, was sentenced to 25 years last month after repeatedly stabbing the writer.

During the event at Hay, Rushdie also said it was an “important moment” for him when he and his wife Eliza “went back to the scene of the crime to show myself I could stand up where I fell down”.

“It will be nice to talk about fiction again because ever since the attack, really the only thing anybody's wanted to talk about is the attack, but I'm over it,” he added.

Rushdie has been under threat of attack since the 1988 publication of his book The Satanic Verses triggered a wave of controversy for its depiction of the prophet Muhammad.

Iran’s former spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the execution of the author, after which Rushdie was forced to spend years in hiding.

Rushdie is considered one of the world’s greatest living authors, and his work often combines magic realism with historical fiction. His second novel, 1981’s Midnight's Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981.