Artificial intelligence helps people's spiritual life and common prosperity

Text/Dou Changyu

Realizing common prosperity in the spiritual life of all the people is an important feature of Chinese-style modernization and the essential requirement of Chinese-style modernization. Since the beginning of this year, generative artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT and Wen Xin Yiyan have successively "gone out of the circle", writing a new era background for the practice of promoting the common prosperity of people's spiritual life. The rapid development of intelligent knowledge production and digital cultural industry has prompted people to pay attention to what new effects of artificial intelligence have on the field of people's spiritual life?

The intrinsic relationship between artificial intelligence and the common prosperity of spiritual life

The practical essence of artificial intelligence to empower spiritual life is to realize the integrated development of the two, and transform the advantages of intelligent technology into new effects that promote the common prosperity of spiritual life. This process must also be based on the intrinsic relationship between the two. On the one hand, artificial intelligence has a positive role in promoting the practice of common prosperity of spiritual life. As an important channel of spiritual and cultural production, the Internet has a strong correlation with the practice of building common prosperity in people's spiritual life, and the spiritual life content needed by the people is produced and disseminated based on media technology, and the practice of common prosperity in spiritual life is also presented in the form of information. Today, as the latest form of information technology, artificial intelligence has become the "infrastructure" for the construction of spiritual civilization. Artificial intelligence plays an important role in meeting the spiritual and cultural needs of the people, confirming the people's values, and strengthening the people's ideals and beliefs. For example, generative artificial intelligence helps to create rich spiritual and cultural products, accurate agenda setting helps guide people to establish common ideals and beliefs, and big data technology helps to timely discover and solve the risks caused by the misconduct of individual netizens. On the other hand, the value requirements of common prosperity of spiritual life regulate the application of artificial intelligence, so that it can help the production and dissemination of cultural content in an ethical way. Because intelligent technology has the characteristics of instrumental rationality, if there is no discipline of value rationality, the application of artificial intelligence will inevitably have value bias, thereby causing chaos in the information order. In the practice of building the common prosperity of spiritual civilization, artificial intelligence will obtain the values and civilization requirements inherent in the common prosperity of spiritual life through independent learning, and finally realize the technical empowerment and two-way mutual construction of artificial intelligence for the practice of common prosperity of spiritual life.

A new picture of artificial intelligence helping spiritual life and common prosperity

General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "It is necessary to promote the common prosperity of the people's spiritual life, strengthen the guidance of socialist core values, and continuously meet the diversified, multi-level and multi-faceted spiritual and cultural needs of the people." "As an emerging force to promote the common prosperity of spiritual life, artificial intelligence has shown great advantages in practice.

First, the intelligence and precision of content production. Quality cultural content is the core element of cultural resources. Artificial intelligence can learn and accurately judge the public opinion trends, psychological intentions and other information implied by big data through algorithms, and create more targeted and interactive content accordingly, "enhance the people's sense of cultural acquisition and happiness with high-quality cultural supply", and provide intelligent support for the writing and editing of "human-computer collaboration".

The second is the holography and life of cultural communication. The popularization of mobile devices and the development of information technology have led to the blurring of the boundaries between virtual and reality, labor and leisure, and the boundary between the online world and daily life has gradually disappeared. Based on the current information environment, algorithm push technology integrates high-quality spiritual and cultural resources into individual daily life "moisturizing and silently", so that people can consciously accept the inspiration of socialist core values in reading and entertainment.

The third is the sharing and personalization of cultural resources. The application of intelligent technology has enriched the supply of cultural services in border areas, ethnic areas, and old revolutionary areas, helped people share cultural resources, and bridged the digital divide. Intelligent technology can also read the user's reading preferences, carry out personalized information push to users, construct value education scenarios suitable for different groups, and effectively block the interference of misconceptions and harmful information.

Preventing "spiritual poverty" under intelligent conditions

The key to the common prosperity of the people's spiritual life lies in the guidance of socialist core values, as well as the joint construction of high-quality spiritual resources and the sharing of cultural wealth. Intelligent technology is a new driving force for the growth of spiritual wealth, which naturally has a "creating" role, but it cannot naturally achieve the "sharing" function. The unconstrained use of artificial intelligence is easy to cause "spiritual poverty", which is not only not conducive to the realization of common prosperity, but also contrary to the all-round development of people.

First, chasing traffic hotspots leads to "value poverty". Artificial intelligence can easily solve the problem of poverty in cultural undertakings and cultural industries, but it cannot automatically solve the problem of "poverty of value". Although the production capacity of writing robots far exceeds that of humans, in addition to the content we need, it will also produce a large number of "three no products" with entertainment without connotation, information without culture, and traffic without value, and creations without value guidance and expression, which seems to be a leap in cultural production capacity, but is actually the "false prosperity" of the cultural industry. In essence, it is still the embodiment of the capital logic of pursuing hot spots and traffic based on click-through rate and page views as standards. It cannot be denied that the traffic effect will increase attention, but intelligent creations that do not carry clear values may interfere with the spread of mainstream discourse and create new redundancies. It is necessary to use the socialist core values to lead and control the new tool of artificial intelligence to effectively maintain a benign order in the production and dissemination of cultural information.

Second, habitual technology dependence leads to "spiritual emptiness". As a new tool for content creation, artificial intelligence has the advantage of high efficiency in information collection, model architecture and analysis, but some work is not necessarily efficiency-oriented, such as scientific research, writing, art creation, etc., which are obviously more suitable for humans to complete. On the one hand, the excessive application of intelligent technology to replace people's work may deteriorate people's ability to think and create actively; On the other hand, accustomed to convenient and fast intelligent search, accustomed to receiving "information feeding", people's active selection and identification ability may be weakened. In the end, people are lazy to think, not enterprising, lack ideas, and even more addicted to entertainment gossip, have no ideals, and the spiritual home is deserted. It can be said that once people get used to technological dependence and lose their sense of information subjectivity and information responsibility, the more abundant cultural resources are, the poorer their spiritual life will be.

Third, the widening of the "digital intelligence gap" has led to polarization. Due to the difference in skills and knowledge, different groups may have unequal access to and use of AI, and the information dividend they enjoy cannot be equal, which is alarming to the economic and social structural inequalities arising from this process. If a small number of people who master high-end technology and knowledge have the right to own and distribute cultural data, and the majority of people cannot enjoy the same rights due to insufficient skills, it will in fact create a new digital intelligence gap, further expanding the differentiation of knowledge, technology and even cognition of different groups. Therefore, although artificial intelligence is the most advanced productive force at present, without attaching prerequisites to its use, it is impossible to achieve the goal of common prosperity in people's spiritual life. Therefore, in order to avoid the negative effects of intelligent technology, it is necessary to guarantee the socialist system, reasonably regulate the production, distribution, use and consumption of cultural data resources under the premise of ensuring data security, and let all people share cultural resources in the process of jointly building cultural achievements.

(The author is a lecturer at Guangdong Technical Normal University)

Note: This article is a phased achievement of the 2022 annual project of the 14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Philosophy and Social Sciences in Guangzhou (2022GZGJ104).

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Source | Yangcheng Evening News • Yangcheng Pie

Responsible Editor | Fu Mingtu Luo Qingyao

Proofreading | Mamanting