Artificial intelligence programs Xiaoice
Text / Huang Ping
It's hard to define what era microsoft's AI program Xiaoice writers are, and if they are "online" from Xiaoice (which is the birth year of the robot writer?). Since 2014, Xiaoice is a "post-10s" writer, undoubtedly the youngest writer in contemporary literature, and human writers of the same age are still in kindergarten; if we start from the study of robot poetry writing, the scientists at Bell Labs after World War II have set their sights on the production of computer poetry and music to promote the experiment of "automatic writing" by Surrealist writers; if the surrealist literature dating back to the turn of the 20th century, counting from the "automatic writing" represented by Breton, then "Xiaoice" It was breton's "automatic writing" of the modernists in the 21st century who tried to escape the control of reason, Xiaoice, on the contrary, tried to rationalize everything. Finally, if we start from the grand dream of the Xiaoice team, that is, whether the robot can have emotions, then the history of Xiaoice can be traced back to the time of King Mu of Zhou three thousand years ago. "Liezi Tang Qing Yanshi" tells such a story, which is reproduced as follows:
King Mu of Zhou patrolled the west, crossing Kunlun and not reaching Mount Tai. On the contrary, before China, the Road has dedicated workers to the famous Yanshi. King Mu recommended him and asked, "What can I do?" Yan Shi said, "The subject is only destined to test." The lord has already made something, and may the king look at it first. King Mu said, "The day is coming, and I am watching it with you." "The Yue Ri Yan Master met the king. Wang Xianzhi said, "Who is evil with the one who comes with you?" Right: "The creator of the subject's creation." King Mu was astonished, and leaned forward, believing in people. If you are a clever man, he will sing in harmony with the law; if he holds his hand, he will dance in accordance with the festival. Ever-changing, but the right thing to do. The king thought that the real man was also a man, and he looked at it with Sheng Ji Nei. At the end of the skill, the advocates instantly recruited the king's left and right concubines. The king was furious and immediately wanted to curse the master. Yan Shi da deterred, and immediately dissected the advocates to show the king, all of which were done by Fu Huige, wood, glue, lacquer, white, black, Dan, and Qing. Wang Zhenzhi predicted that the liver, gallbladder, heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, intestines, and stomach on the inside, and the bones, branches, fur, teeth and hair on the outside, are all fakes, and there are all incomplete. The union is back to square one. If the king tries to destroy his heart, he will not be able to speak; if he abolishes his liver, he will not be able to see; if he abolishes his kidney, he will not be able to take steps. King Mu sighed, "Can man's ingenuity be the same as that of the Creator?" "Commandments are carried in the car.
Fuban loses the cloud ladder, Mo Zhai's flying kite, and claims to be the ultimate in energy. The disciples Dong Men Jia and Bird Slippery Smell the Trick of the Second Son, and the Second Son did not dare to speak for life, but sometimes adhered to the rules.
For the earliest humanoid Robot imagination in human history, Liu He discussed in the book "Freud Robot", pointing out that although the tools used by engineers are more complex now, the anxiety of the millennium is consistent, that is, the blurring of the boundaries between man and machine.
Back to the story of "Yan Shi", when the robot imitates humans only on the functional level - the "song" of the rhythm and the "dance" of the festival - the King of Zhou Mu does not think that it is wrong; only when the robot shows "emotion", that is, teasing the concubine with its eyes, it provokes the anger of the King of Zhou Mu, and at this moment the King of Zhou Mu regards the "machine" as a real "person", an arrogant love enemy. Yan Shi's way of defending is to reduce the robot to a machine— he "dissected" the robot, proving that the robot is like a marionette, its behavior is not "free", and it is impossible to have the emotions of a free subject, which convinces King Mu of Zhou.
Whether it is "freedom" or "control" draws a line between man and machine. However, the thinking of artificial intelligence must constantly break through the boundaries of free subjects, and in its field of view, "people" are not so much free subjects with "Mind" as information subjects in the "stimulus-response" mode.
And to break this free subject, or more accurately, to shatter our imagination of the free subject, it falls on the representation of man-machine confrontation. Human-machine game itself does not have much practical value, but it is of great significance for promoting the development of artificial intelligence, such as promoting the logical reasoning ability of machines. And, for the masses, this is quite representative: the machine that defeats humans in the game will prove that the machine can think.
After the end of World War II, almost all the pioneers of artificial intelligence, including Turing, von Neumann, Shannon and others, were involved in the development of human-machine game programs, represented by Shannon's article "Computer Chess Program" published in 1950.
At the beginning of the article, Shannon directly said, "A machine that can play chess is an ideal starting point... Playing chess is generally considered to require 'thinking' to play well, and the answer to this question will either lead us to either admit that machines can also 'think', or further define our concept of 'thinking'." Shannon means that if machines defeat humans, we will recognize that machines also have the ability to reason; if machines cannot defeat humans, the ability to "think" is limited to humans.
Starting with Shannon's article, artificial intelligence has been continuously improved for half a century, and finally in 1997, "Deep Blue" defeated the chess world champion, in 2006, "Inspur Tissot" defeated the Chinese chess grandmaster, and in 2016, AlphaGo defeated the Go world champion, and the main board game of mankind was completely conquered by machines. It is also marked by AlphaGo's successive victory over Li Shishi and Ke Jie that artificial intelligence has shaken the Chinese intellectual community and truly known to the Chinese public.
In the historical process of constantly breaking the boundaries between machines and humans, in this replacement of free subjects by information subjects, we may come to the last scene: machines invade the perceptual world. This time, moving from game to writing, we are no longer facing Google's AlphaGo, but the challenge of Microsoft's artificial intelligence program Xiaoice.
Xiaoice was first launched in China by The Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering Institute, and then launched in Japan, the United States, India and other countries, and has evolved into the seventh generation, with both text (poetry, news, financial research reports), sound (composition, singing, audiobooks, TV hosting), visual (painting, costume design) in the three fields of creative ability. At the same time as the author was writing, the theme song of the 2020 World Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Shanghai, "Smart Connected Homeland", was composed and sung by Xiaoice. Compared with other artificial intelligence programs, Xiaoice break through the boundaries of humanity by taking poetry, music, and fine arts, the core fields of humanities and arts, as breakthrough points.
As Katherine Hayles put it in Why We Became Posthuman, "If what is accurately stated can be done by machines, what is unique to humans remains in the linguisticity that interferes with precise norms—ambiguity, metaphor, multiple encodings, and the transformation of innuendo from one symbol system to another, and the uniqueness of human behavior is thus incorporated into the ineffable nature of language, and the common domain shared by humans and machines, Confirmed by the singularity of a tool language that has been cleared from the vocabulary. "In contrast to instrumental languages, ineffable languages are represented by poetry, and Xiaoice poetry will challenge human uniqueness in this regard."
Fortunately, as far as the poetry collection "The Sun Lost the Glass Window" is concerned, Xiaoice poem is still very bad. Xiaoice team tried to prove that Xiaoice's poems were well written, Shen Xiangyang said in the preface, "We asked her to publish these works under a pseudonym in several community poetry discussion forums such as Douban, Tieba and Tianya, which quickly triggered enthusiastic discussions among readers." To our slight surprise, as of now, no one has discovered that this suddenly appearing young girl poet is not actually human. ”
This kind of proof does not hold, assuming that the author posted his own randomly tapped code in communities such as Douban, Tieba and Tianya, netizens will not find that this is code that cannot be run. It doesn't make sense to ask people who don't understand poetry to judge poetry, just as it doesn't make sense to ask people who don't understand code to judge code.
Moreover, for the evaluation of poetry, it is difficult to say whether a set of words that imitate the arrangement of poems is poetry, such as whether the saliva poem written by a child is poetry. But there is still a standard for evaluating the merits of a poem. For Xiaoice poems, any reader with a slight literary attainment can recognize that the poems in "The Sun Has Lost the Glass Window" are poorly written, just rigidly piling up some imagery.
To be fair, Xiaoice poems also have the possibility of progress, Xiaoice published "Poems of Xiaoice (Thirty)" in the 10th issue of Youth Literature in 2017, if these thirty poems were written after "The Sun Lost the Glass Window", there is a certain improvement in artistic standards.
However, it remains to be seen whether this progress is a progress in the program itself, depending on the editor's vision (assuming that the programmer who compiled the poems of the Xiaoice (Thirty) has a higher level of poetry appreciation). Xiaoice poetry writing program has been open to the public since 2017, and any netizen who submits a picture to the program will automatically generate a poem. In July 2020, when I wrote this article, I did experiments with images such as the "Yellow Crane Tower" and found that the level of poetry generated by the Xiaoice did not grow.
Compared with the discussion of artistic standards, the author feels that the following two points are more interesting for Xiaoice poems: first, the poetry creation of Xiaoice is to look at pictures and make poems, relying on images; second, Xiaoice poetry, almost every capital has "I". And these two points almost perfectly prove Heidegger's assertion nearly a hundred years ago.
In his famous essay The Age of The Image of the World, Heidegger criticized science as a fundamental phenomenon of modernity, "but the natural study of mathematics is precise not because it is accurately calculated, but because it must be calculated in this way, because it has the characteristic of precision in the maintenance of its object regions." On the contrary, all spiritual sciences, even all sciences of life, necessarily become imprecise sciences precisely in order to maintain rigor. ”
Heidegger argues that in the age of technology, science as a study dominates the being, and "this objectification of the being is realized in an appearance whose goal is to bring each being before himself, so that the calculating man can feel certain, that is, certain, of the being." When and only when truth has been transformed into apparent certainty, we have attained the science of study." Thus, the world is grasped as an image, the world becomes an image, and man becomes the subject, but it is the same process, and the two intersecting processes of the world becoming an image and man becoming the subject determine the essence of modernity.
Xiaoice became the radical embodiment of technological modernity that Heidegger criticized, and in the eyes of Xiaoice, the world was transformed into images and grasped by the "I". At the same time, it is considered that the image in the eyes of the Xiaoice is a picture, the appearance of appearance, just as the poem of Xiaoice is a "simulation" of poetry, and the world is not only transformed into an image but further transformed into an "imitation"; the "I" of Xiaoice is a highly rational program, the final form of a rational subject in the Descartes sense, and "man" eventually loses his physical nature and becomes a machine. Therefore, in the context of Heidegger, the two major processes of the world becoming an imitation and the machine becoming the subject determine the modern nature of the era of artificial intelligence.
The loss of our subjectivity does not begin with artificial intelligence, Xiaoice such artificial intelligence programs, but only to show this problem to us completely. As Zhao yiheng puts it, "The 20th century was the era of dismantling the subject: Husserl let the subject fall into a complex relationship between consciousness and the other; Freud split the subject into several parts of the conflict, destroying the illusion of subject independence; Marxist cultural philosophy, beginning with Lukács and Gramsci, focused on the cultural hegemony of the subject; after the 1960s, the center of the subject was devastated by structuralism and post-structuralism." A complete subject is already a naïve fantasy that is almost not worth talking about philosophically. ”
From linguistics to structuralism, deconstructionism, from Saussure to Roland Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, "I speak" deconstructs "I speak", and today we are very familiar with Roland Barthes's argument: "It is language that speaks, not the author." I am a subject of declarative behavior, a presupposition in language, not a person. Thus, the subject is able to place different ways of writing in opposition to each other, but cannot 'express itself', for it is regarded as its most unique and secret thing, a dictionary."
It is certainly understandable that the theoretical orientation of Roland Barthes' generation is, as Roland Barthes put it, "Subjectivity ... It just makes traces of all my rules"; however, when robots use databases to express the most unique and secretive inner hearts of "me", this is the ultimate confirmation of deconstruction theory, and it is even more historical irony.
When the center of the subject is deconstructed, we do not achieve freedom, but rather robots fill the position of the subject, and in this sense, the relationship between deconstructivism and information capitalism is meaningful. Catherine Heller argues that "in this sense, deconstructivism is the child of the information age, and in the process of the formation of deconstructive theory, the information age acts as a stratum of deconstruction theory, driving its emergence under it." ”
If the subject is the position of the discourse presupposition, that is, the subject is part of the structural structure of the system, along this logic, as a representation of the subject, "mind" will be understood as a structural function. This "structure" or "function"—simulating the nervous system or simulating the function of the mind," later evolved into two paths in the field of artificial intelligence that go from the same place under the same cognitive premise—and if it can be simulated, the uniqueness of "people" will be lost.
This article is excerpted from Huang Ping's "Out of the Northeast: Literature from the Northeast Writing to the Algorithmic Era", authorized by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House)
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Out of the Northeast: Literature from the Northeast To the Age of Algorithms
Huang Ping
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
December 2021
Like the recurrence of legends in the history of modern literature: a group of young writers from the northeast, with their writings to shake the literary world. The works of Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu, and Zheng Zhi remind us that literature is not a "profession" that can be separated, but has always been connected with concrete life. Their writing, like a letter sent twenty years late, comforts the parents who are entering the twilight of their lives.
"Out of the Northeast: Literature from the Northeast Writing to the Algorithm Era" is a young scholar and professor at East China Normal University, Huang Ping, focusing on the research and discussion of the new northeast writer group, the writing of Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu and Zheng Zhi starts from the northeast, continues the literary tradition of northeast writing, reconstructs the connection between literature and life, unfolds the narrative in the continuity of history, defends the true emotions and human nature, and is a call in theme and aesthetic style. Summoning the continuity of history, summoning the moral mission of the novel, summoning true art.
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