At a recent event, Mo Yan was full of ridicule about how he used ChatGPT to write an award speech for Yu Hua, with just a few keywords, ChatGPT can quickly generate a Shakespearean praise of more than 1,000 words in seconds, but in Mo Yan's view, it is just "like a plate of salad, without originality and without emotion."
His views represent the views of a section of the industry. Although the "intelligently overwhelming" ChatGPT can "create" various genres such as poetry, novels, dramas, and essays, can imitate Li Bai, Lu Xun, Shakespeare and other styles, and can produce works that are comparable to or even surpass the current routine and fast food texts, in the face of truly excellent writers and great works, ChatGPT's performance is still lackluster. No matter how much like a person, ChatGPT is not a person after all, relying on the algorithm to depict the characters, constructed plots, narrated stories are just a kind of retelling, recomposing and re-splicing of the "feeding" corpus, no matter how unobtrusive, how smooth and decent, if carefully tasted, it is just like chewed steamed buns, without taste.
However, on the other hand, some practitioners smell the threat from ChatGPT's amazing self-learning iteration speed.
Compared with the "simple and crude" mode of generating language based on corpus correlation probability and statistics in the past, ChatGPT has the causal chain processing ability to simulate human thinking processes, thus showing a very high understanding and learning ability of human language. This is undoubtedly both joyful and worrying. People expect its help, but they are also anxious about its threat; People who hope that with the blessing of artificial intelligence can be freed from what David Graebau calls "meaningless work", they also feel Frankenstein's panic: Is it possible, or to what extent, that humans will be replaced by "monsters" of their own making?
The concerns caused by ChatGPT have spread to many industries such as information and data, financial investment, education and training, translation consulting, etc., as well as the literary world, which was once considered to be able to "sit back and relax" in the face of artificial intelligence. Literature is often considered to be the culmination of human intelligence, and the unique human intellect and emotion, imagination and creativity contained in it have created a King Kong body that resists artificial intelligence. However, ChatGPT can fake the real and even crush the superb ability of many ordinary people's language level, which makes the originally calm literary circle and many literature-related practitioners panic.
In February this year, Clark World, a well-known American science fiction magazine, detected more than 500 submissions written or edited by programs such as ChatGPT, and had to temporarily close the submission channel; In April, the domestic science fiction magazine Science Fiction World also issued an announcement, rejecting any manuscripts of artificial intelligence-generated content, emphasizing that "what we need is a future story written by people for people to see." At first glance, this is a bit of a science fiction movie shining into reality: robots made by humans steal people's jobs, so people have to launch a counterattack against robots. We can't help but ask: has artificial intelligence really threatened literary creation, the leader of human intelligence?
For now, at least, the answer is no.
A literary work that can truly be passed down through the ages and is evocative must have a spirit and temperature, and its creators not only have the embodiment and empathy that can perceive joy, anger and sorrow, but also have a unique vision and a sensitivity that is different from ordinary people. Zhu Ziqing's back of the father who climbed the platform to buy oranges for his son was full of touching sincerity and the delicacy of the soul: "I saw him wearing a black cloth hat, a black cloth horse coat, and a dark green cotton robe, staggering to the side of the railway, slowly leaning down, it was not too difficult. But when he crossed the railway, it was not easy to climb to the platform over there. He climbed on it with both hands, and then retracted his feet upwards; His fat body leaned slightly to the left, showing that he was trying, and when I saw his back, my tears quickly flowed." When ChatGPT was asked to write an essay entitled "Father's Back", it presented a pile of stereotypes: "Whenever I think of my father's back, my heart surges with endless gratitude and respect." His silent dedication and selfless love made me understand that the strength of family is irreplaceable. His back is like a solid flag, always reminding me to stick to my original intention and work hard. My father's back is the warmest refuge in my life's journey. In the storms of life, his back gives me strength and inspires me to keep moving forward on the road of pursuing my dreams. Apparently, ChatGPT, which has been fed by countless "chicken soups", stops at shouting slogan-style clichés, so correct yet so mediocre, so "giving everything it has" to present the best answer, but pales in comparison with "overexertion".
Because the charm of literature lies precisely in the dissolution of "absolute rightness". It refuses to follow the rules, preferring to come out obliquely, it is both reasonable and unexpected, its loud firmness makes people excited, and its stumbling hesitation makes people feel even more melancholy. Ma Zhiyuan's "Tianjingsha Qiusi" is the top product of ancient sad autumn, "dead vines and old trees faint, small bridges and flowing water, ancient road west wind thin horse" seems to be just a pile of images and a list of nouns, but the closing of the sentence "broken intestines in the end of the world" makes the heaven and earth suddenly feel desolate, and at this time the almost naked white painting is the wonderful of "silent victory over sound". The opening of Lu Xun's "Autumn Night" "In my back garden, I can see two trees outside the wall, one is a jujube tree, and the other is also a jujube tree", like the repetition of sick sentences makes people scratch their heads, but after reading the whole text, the seemingly faint language strengthens the effect of the jujube tree, giving people a sense of surprise impact and awe. In the words of the Russian formalist critic Shklovsky, one of the central manifestations of literary nature is "defamiliarization": "Art exists so that man can restore a sense of life, that he can feel things, not just know things." The technique of art is to make the object unfamiliar, to make the form difficult, to increase the difficulty of feeling and the length of time, because the process of feeling is itself an aesthetic purpose. Obviously, the "automated" language of "reasonable, reasonable, and congruntial" generated by ChatGPT relying on data and algorithms is exactly what literature strives to break, and the "defamiliarization" content and form after creative deformation is the mystery of literature becoming literature.
But "defamiliarization" does not mean novelty for the sake of novelty, in other words, the criticism of literature, and even the creativity of people in general, is not about breaking the convention itself, but more on what happens after breaking the convention: whether it can bring people new insights, whether it can provide new perspectives, new methods, and new theories for understanding the world. The reason why ChatGPT is considered to have achieved a qualitative leap is that it breaks through the limitations of traditional artificial intelligence is only "search engine", "repeater" and "copier", but can find a variety of connections from the ocean of rich knowledge or words, some connections are habitual common sense, some connections are just soup without changing medicine, but some connections will also be eye-catching, so in a sense can be described as "original". But ChatGPT can only go so far, meaningful "originality" must require the participation of human thought and consciousness, because only human thinking can reflect on the whole and understand paradoxes, and only human consciousness can open the plural space of thought through negation and move towards infinity through uncertainty. If there is no finishing touch to "the broken intestine in the end of the world", "dead vine and old tree faint" is just a dull reproduction of the objective scene; If there is no rendering and foil of the night sky and small flowers in the future, and there is no complex emotion of "I" lonely and resolute, painful and unyielding, "one is a jujube tree, and the other is also a jujube tree" is just a monotonous and insignificant statement. ChatGPT can't write Kafkaesque paradoxes, O. Henry's twists and turns, Hamlet's hesitation, or "years later, Colonel Aureliano stands before the firing squad and remembers the distant afternoon when his father took him to visit the ice."
As Xu Zechen said: "As long as the robot is not a person, there must be something that 'people can do, it can't do'." For example, the feeling of life with furry skin associated with handiwork is something it does not have. "We love handmade products, even if they are not as good as machine production, because we can feel the value of the people behind them. This is especially true of literature, which is fed and nourished by human intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. Truly excellent literature is a high degree of condensation of human wisdom, the ultimate use of human language, which represents the supreme point of thought and points to the deepest point of human nature.
Author: Sun Lu (Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of English, Shanghai Overseas Chinese University)
Editor: Fan Xin
Curated by: Shao Ling