{"id":540466,"date":"2026-07-09T05:37:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T05:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/540466\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T05:37:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T05:37:18","slug":"salman-rushdie-slams-ai-teases-midnights-children-tv-adaptation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/540466\/","title":{"rendered":"Salman Rushdie Slams AI, Teases ‘Midnight’s Children’ TV adaptation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSalman Rushdie<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNothing. Zero,\u201d Rushdie tells Variety when asked what part AI should play in creative work. \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019t do is something nobody\u2019s done before. And that\u2019s what art is, is to find things people haven\u2019t done before. So, I mean I have less than zero interest in AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe author made the comments prior to accepting Liberatum\u2019s 14th Cultural Honor <\/a>at a ceremony in London on July 8, in a wide-ranging conversation with Variety.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cArt at its best is a lot more than entertainment,\u201d Rushdie says. \u201cIt\u2019s challenging. And you challenge people, sometimes people don\u2019t like it, but that is all the more reason for doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRushdie 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 \u201cMidnight\u2019s Children,\u201d the 2012 film he adapted himself alongside director Deepa Mehta, as a rare exception he was satisfied with.<\/p>\n

\n\tRushdie says a previously announced television adaptation of \u201cMidnight\u2019s Children\u201d with filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj did not move forward.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYeah, that fell apart,\u201d Rushdie says. \u201cFor money reasons and, and script reasons, I think Netflix didn\u2019t like the direction that the scripts took. It happens. A very talented filmmaker, just didn\u2019t work out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRushdie says there is renewed interest in a multi-episode television adaptation of \u201cMidnight\u2019s Children,\u201d as well as separate interest in a film adaptation of his novel \u201cThe Ground Beneath Her Feet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere are conversations around two or three of my books,\u201d Rushdie says, \u201cbut believe it when you see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPushing back on the notion that great novels rarely translate into great films, Rushdie cites \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d trilogy, Luchino Visconti\u2019s \u201cThe Leopard\u201d and Martin Scorsese\u2019s \u201cThe Age of Innocence\u201d as adaptations he considers equal to their literary sources.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn upcoming projects, Rushdie discussed \u201cKnife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie<\/a>,\u201d the Alex Gibney<\/a>-directed documentary based on his 2024 memoir \u201cKnife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tAsked about a potential biopic of his life, Rushdie says, \u201cI didn\u2019t become a writer in order to write about myself. In fact, I think I\u2019m the least interesting subject. But I became a writer to make things up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRushdie says he is also at work on a new novel, though he declines to share details, calling it \u201cearly days.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Salman Rushdie has declared that artificial intelligence has no role to play in literature, cinema or storytelling of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,229633,218,219,61,60,229634,229635,13522,80],"class_list":["post-540466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alex-gibney","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-knife-the-attempted-murder-of-salman-rushdie","tag-midnights-children","tag-salman-rushdie","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}