Bright** Visual China.
In January of this year, when a professor at Northern Michigan University in the United States graded a course he taught, he found that the ** that received the highest score in the class was written in artificial intelligence. In October, Tsinghua University professor Shen Yang's collaborative artificial intelligence creation of "The Land of Memories" won the second prize of the 5th Jiangsu Youth Science Fiction Competition. On November 11, the Department of Chinese of Peking University held a seminar entitled "What is Traditional Literature in the Era of Scientific and Technological Civilization?" "Lectures, literary critics focus on the situation and future of traditional literature in the era of scientific and technological civilization. The juxtaposition of these three pieces of news raises a range of common topics. For example, what is the essence of AI literary writing? How do people need to cope?
Literary writing is a game of permutations and combinations of words, which fits the attributes and specialties of artificial intelligence
The Dictionary of Chinese Writing, the Dictionary of Basic Writing and other literature believe that writing is not only a process of thinking activities for people to use language symbols to reflect objective things, express thoughts and emotions, disseminate knowledge and information, and create spiritual products, but also a tool for people to understand and transform nature, society and human beings themselves.
Literary writing is first and foremost a game of permutations and combinations of words, and theoretically speaking, any literary work is based on speech and words. AI writing can also be seen as a permutation and combination of information, as shown in Liu Cixin's sci-fi "Poetry Cloud". Having a large corpus is a natural advantage of artificial intelligence, and permuting and combining programmatic digital content is its attribute specialty. The literary writing process of artificial intelligence is similar to leading a child into a sea of text blocks, and the text blocks he grabs can be arranged and combined into several articles according to a certain logic.
Although AI is not as sophisticated as the human brain, it only requires simple and dedicated thinking to surpass humans in specific aspects. This ability to think does not necessarily pose a threat to humanity, nor does it necessarily make it a higher intelligence than humans. Because any evolution is full of variables and coincidences, and does not completely follow the linear development process from quantitative change to qualitative change, even if the genetic mutation is difficult to completely break through the germplasm boundary: in terms of the existence paradigm of life, carbon-based life still cannot break through the boundary of carbohydrates and evolve into other non-carbohydrate forms; In terms of function, even if the crow has been proven by scientists to have a certain logical ability, trained to speak and sing, it cannot become a linguist and a home, even if the dog can effectively recognize odors through massive training, it may not be able to become a qualified smeller, let alone an expert in making perfumes.
Artificial intelligence based on modern technology, thanks to the rules of digital intelligence and matrix logic, has become an existence with super imitation conditions and capabilities, but it is also limited by this. Although some people say that "The Land of Memories" is 100% created by artificial intelligence, in fact, it took about 3 hours and 66 dialogue prompts to generate 43,061 characters from artificial intelligence, and finally copied 5,915 characters from it. Scholar Huang Mingfen believes that artificial intelligence has far surpassed the production speed of human writers in the permutation and combination of words, but human selection in literary writing still plays a decisive role, whether it is programming or text screening.
Artificial intelligence is not yet able to construct its own world inward, and cannot realize the transformation of "thing-me-text".
It has been pointed out that writing with a program is as old as the program itself. In 1952, the world's first computer that could run a program ran the first program that was a love poem writing software written by computer scientist Streich. According to investigation, artificial intelligence has at least created literary works such as "Rose", "Kite", "Steak", "Only This Once", "Betrayal", "True Love", "The Day the Computer Wrote **", "The Sunshine Lost the Glass Window", "Everything Loves Each Other", "The Land of Machine Memories" and other literary works. It can be seen that artificial intelligence is already a "veteran" with more than 70 years of writing experience, and perhaps the previous hardware and software have limited its development. Today's multiple artificial intelligence are interconnected, can the so-called "emergence" constitute a qualitative change in literary creation? This seems to have the same reason as getting a group of people who can arrange and combine the building blocks of words together to see if they can produce something great.
Some people say that although "The Land of Memories" won the award, it did not meet the publication standards. In fact, the author has also tried to use artificial intelligence to write, with "a middle-aged woman, forced to marry two husbands, ran away from marriage, committed suicide, lost a child, is very painful but difficult to express, repeat the child's name to everyone, instigation, poverty, downfall, eyes, facial expressions" as the key words to write the countryside**, to compare Lu Xun's "Blessing". Artificial intelligence created "Deep Mother's Love", and the author repeatedly continued, added and deleted, polished and other dialogue prompts with it, but it is difficult to see the finishing touches of Lu Xun's "God" details, such as, "Only the eyeballs or a round can also indicate that she is a living thing." "Reasoning, there should be. — but not necessarily ,......Who cares about such things...She withdrew her hand as if she had been burned, and her face turned gray at the same time, and she no longer took the candlestick, but stood in a state of distraction. ”
Human writing follows and empowers words through the transformation law of "thing-me-text", pays attention to the pen of genius, pursues to break the convention, and emphasizes the unique beauty of the individual, in which the decisive role is the natural probabilities of the mysterious carbon-based brain of human beings. For example, "Red Apricot Branches in Spring" and "Spring Breeze and the South Bank of the Green River" are the same, and many "Untitled" have different flavors, and the two essays of the same name, "Qinhuai River in the Sound of Oars and Lights", have their own merits. The value of classic works lies in keeping pace with the times, and innovating the existing textual meanings, symbolic images, rhetorical devices and even grammatical rules to provide people with irreplaceable emotions and thoughts.
At present, artificial intelligence cannot construct its own world inward, has no individual experience, and cannot experience the transformation link of "thing-me-text", its literary writing is to select the optimal solution through matrix logic and algorithm rules in the existing database, and the possibility of imagination and assignment is lacking, only the words are implemented, the sentences are complete, large, and plausible digital and intelligent rhetoric, which can give people knowledge but lack emotion, and there is a pure form but not artistic creation, just like the sculpture that resembles but has no emotion and soul, full of ingenuity. From the perspective of writing skills, artificial intelligence writing does not let the dashes, ellipses and exclamation marks that are full of extraneous meanings play their due role, and will not use small squares and other blank spaces to indicate how many words are omitted here, and there is a lack of eye-catching expressive writing, which may be an important factor in determining the quality of a literary work.
Technology cannot break through the limits of language arts, and creativity is still the "anchor of human beings".
Humans are completely understandably concerned about AI literary writing. There is an argument that when AI itself becomes an information organizer, people have concerns about its function and panic about its identity. Some experts also said that artificial intelligence autonomously provides a new type of knowledge that humans can neither speak nor understand in the process of computing, and the uncertainty generated in the process of computing causes the opacity of cognition, resulting in humans being unable to see through the operation logic of artificial intelligence, and then worrying that artificial intelligence will have autonomous consciousness. Will artificial intelligence one day provide a kind of literature that breaks through the boundaries of human cognition and has never been seen before?
Artificial intelligence still uses the human language and symbol system. In this way, even if artificial intelligence does have some kind of self-awareness in the distant future, and can understand the meaning of human words to a certain extent, and can write, it does not mean that it will definitely be able to create good literary works. The algorithmic rules and digital intelligence rhetoric of artificial intelligence make it good at pure form, anthropomorphic semantics and the rules of permutation and combination of words, which determines that it will also serve as a high-level imitator of human thinking, still providing knowledge or superficial pleasure within the human writing paradigm, at best, it is a parallel style and supplement to human literary writing, which will not change the essence of human literary writing, nor can it produce subversive and replacement effects.
AI lacks versatility, flexibility, explainability, and trustworthiness. Scholar Zhao Tingyang pointed out that artificial intelligence cannot answer two "strange questions" that are the limits of human thought: paradox and infinity. The high efficiency of artificial intelligence is based on the matrix logic and algorithm rules given by humans, and the certainty of the program also gives it clear boundaries. In this closed world, AI is not yet able to solve the problem of illogic and rules. True creation does not depend on arbitrariness and chance, but is based on a conscious behavioral purpose that requires the creation of new rules while breaking old ones. This is the shortcoming of artificial intelligence.
In fact, the final effect of AI literary writing depends on the person. According to human instructions, artificial intelligence makes corresponding actions, forming a parallel existence corresponding to human beings, reflecting and supplementing human literary creation, rather than replacing it. It is crucial that the rights and responsibilities, boundaries and balances of AI are subject to human beings in order to ensure that AI is sustainable and controllable at all stages, as required by the interests and dignity of human beings. The steering wheel and final decision on the advancement of AI are still firmly in the hands of humans.
The vast majority of people on the planet can speak and write, and there are not many who can create classics, and even fewer who influence, change, or even subvert the writing paradigm of an era. It will be the irreplaceable creativity of humanity that will hold the last frontier of humanity. In "Poetry Cloud", Li Bai, the incarnation of the god of technology in the eleventh dimension, traveled the world and wrote countless poems, but he had to sigh convincingly that he could not surpass Li Bai. Liu Cixin expresses the inability of technology to push the limits of language arts. Only human beings can combine thinking and practice in literary writing, integrate metaphorical thinking with logical thinking, present solemn beauty and profound thoughts, and nourish people's hearts.
(Author: Li Bin, postdoctoral fellow and associate professor of the School of Liberal Arts, Guizhou Normal University).