The birth and application of ChatGPT continues to be popular around the world, with conversations, code, translations, papers, scripts, and news reports, and a book written entirely by AI, 45 Ways to Find the Purpose of Life, is about to be published.
Can AI really create? What if you let AI that stays at home create travel literature? Out of curiosity, we tried to lead ChatGPT to write a snowy scene in Stockholm:
In addition to the lack of logic in expression, this text is more like a collage composition, suitable for many scenes.
Look at this text again:
I took the night train from Stockholm and arrived in Swedish Lapland at 2:10 p.m. It's dusk, or "blue hour," at this point in mid-November, and the slate snow looks colder than the snow. The other five passengers who got off the train from Kiruna quickly got into a private car or the only taxi and disappeared, leaving the empty train heading for the Norwegian border. The station was empty and I couldn't find anyone to inquire about the hotel's directions. The sky was suddenly filled with a rush of snow, and strange and hectic snowflakes fluttered in the cold light of a freezer emitted by a lonely street lamp.
—From the Travel Writing Guide
A few words depict the unique natural and cultural landscape of the area, through carefully considered phrasing and metaphors, and integrate the author's own experience, observation, feelings and aesthetics, such words may be difficult to replicate with cold algorithms.
However, AI has a super learning ability, if it is trained to receive master's writing training, will we come to the same conclusion? Can it write better work?
Step 01 The foundation of writing
Before conceiving a story, "facts" and "records" are the collection box of materials, the petri dish of inspiration, and the foundation of all creation. Combine text and video forms to record what you see, hear and feel.
Legendary Graham Greene, a 21-time Nobel Prize nominee, wrote every day, five hundred words at a time, often on a small notepad he carried with him, no matter where he was.
Documentary photographer Dorothea Lange once said, "The camera is a tool that teaches us how to see the world without it." "Writing is also a tool that teaches us how to observe everyday life when we don't have a pen in our hands. The more you record, the more you observe, and closer observation can inject new understanding into something familiar.
Step 02 Participatory observation
Immerse yourself in the context of the story, become a witness and participant, and try to reach the truth beneath the surface.
Paul Soru, the godfather of modern travel literature, believes that convenient communication and social media can make it difficult to focus and make the experience very compromised, and he advises writers to "learn the local language, communicate with the locals, live with them, and slowly return to themselves".
Matthew Desmond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist for "Sweeping the Floor: Poverty and Profiteering in American Cities," lived in a trailer with people who had lost their homes. He put it bluntly: "When you are trying to understand the behavior of others, you need to shape your own life according to their lifestyle as fully and truthfully as possible. ”
Matthew Desmond
Step 03 Listen to different voices
Diverse perspectives and remarks are sometimes the best interpretation of a topic, and keeping an open mind is the only way to encounter surprises and surprises.
Nobel laureate S. A. Alexievich recorded the Chernobyl events truthfully presenting different voices and opposing views, largely avoiding the bias of the first perspective, and her polyphonic writing "became a memorial of suffering and courage in our time."
Haruki Murakami once expressed a similar view: "I think my job is to observe other people and the world, not judge them. I always wish I could get rid of the so-called conclusions. I want everything in the world to have all possibilities. ”
Haruki Murakami
Step 04 Observe yourself through the eyes of others
Come to a new place and talk to the locals about your personal experience, country, religion, gender, class, etc., and find out what they think of themselves.
Margaret Atwood once described the American expatriate compound within the walls in Canadian Perspective: "As soon as the gate closes, you come to Syracuse, New York. Hot dogs, burgers, cokes and rock music surround you. For Americans, going to a strange country should be like landing on the moon, with oxygen tanks filled with American air strapped to their backs and spacesuits firmly worn to protect them from the outside world. ”
Margaret Atwood
With the help of other people's perspectives, you can rediscover your own culture. As Graham Green said, once you cross the border, "your life is no longer the same as before" and the cells of your body are reborn.
Step 05 Be diligent in revising
Letting go of unnecessary elements and reducing adjectives and adverbs is an effective way for many writers to improve their expression — even though the pain it brings them is tantamount to "murdering their lover."
Susan Sontag wrote of her revision experience: "I never write quickly or lightly, and my first draft usually has only a few valuable elements. I had to find these elements, expand them, and discard them all the useless or boring. ”
Susan Sontag
As a representative writer of the "minimalist" writing style, Hemingway's works are concise and capable, and he rewrote the last page of "Farewell, Arms" 39 times alone.
After communication and running-in, ChatGPT may be able to imitate human expression, assist humans to take shape of ideas that are beginning to take shape, and thus "create" better works. However, for literary creation, AI is still unable to walk, observe, experience, and express emotions like humans, let alone explore the unknown in an immersive way, and present the thickness and temperature of life accumulated layer by layer through the collision of self and the external world.
For creators, no matter what genre of writing, "walking" is an eternal theme. As the old saying goes, "Read ten thousand books, travel thousands of miles", to go to unknown places, is to reach the mystery of the self, to reconstruct the subjective vision, to record and retain memories with words, perhaps a natural impulse.
From the blazing Sahara story written by Sanmao, to He Wei's "Jiangcheng", "Wayfinding China" and "Strange Stone"; From Li Juan's pure Altay "winter pasture" to Liu Zichao's adventure into the "lost satellite" hinterland of Central Europe... In addition to wonderful writing and novel exotic observations, the writer's courage to break through himself, unpredictable encounters, communication and collision with different people, understanding and interpretation of unfamiliar cultures are all unique charms brought by walking.
However, in reality, although we yearn for distant places and love all the scenery on the journey, it is inevitable that like untrained ChatGPT, we often encounter such problems: impressive experiences become painless when they are written; A fresh and energetic experience, written but as lackluster as a running coke; Tell stories from different regions and read the same.
In daily life, how should we keep the Yoshimitsu Katayu that flashes in our minds? How to write a powerful sentence? And how to tell a good story?
"Travel Writing Guide" takes 62 master writers such as Hemingway, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, George Parker, He Wei and other 62 master writers as examples to share their creative experience, using "travel" as an introduction, combining master concepts, classic cases, massive resources... Sorted into 10 classes with rigorous and clear context.
From topic selection to conception, from first draft to revision, from detail portrayal to style shaping, this book deeply analyzes essays, travelogues, memoirs, character features, news interviews and other writing genres, and answers what to write, how to write, and how to write better. The book has been designated as a textbook and recommended book for writing courses by many colleges and universities - the University of Chicago, the University of Florida, and the largest creative writing school in the United States, "Gotham Writing Workshop".
Toni Morrison said: "We have language, and it is the measure of our lives. "From recording facts to telling stories, from observing others to knowing themselves, human beings create the world through writing. After experiencing the days of isolation and isolation, it is easier for us to discover the importance of walking, eager to step out of the siege, cross the ordinary border, discover and feel the novelty and throbbing of life, and "be the sailor of one world, rush to all the docks" again.
Travel literature goes a step further, with a pen, a wandering, you can imagine and participate in another life. Describe the journey, record the touch, think about the deep meaning... Words are a way to connect the self and the world, resist nothingness and difficulties, let people understand and accept with an open vision and mind, dissolve the uncertainties of life, so as to regain mastery of life and confirm themselves.
No matter how the outside world changes, to see, to hear, to immerse, to become an explorer, to experience an unusual life, to capture those fascinating stories scattered around the world, perhaps in this era of rapid development of science and technology, we can rediscover the temperature of human nature untouched by data and algorithms, and reach an infinite place of life.
In addition to the actual pictures, the pictures in the text are all from the Internet