AI enters the literary world: "Make writing as easy as breathing"?
Students are busy writing papers with AI, programmers are busy writing code with AI, painters are busy painting with AI, lonely ordinary people are busy chatting with AI...
This is not a story that exists in science fiction, but a common scenario that takes place in 2023: tireless AI is trying to enter one field after another, replacing the original workers in the field. Some people are also excited about this, and an AI industry practitioner told Southern Weekend reporter: The first year has arrived.
These AI tool slogans promise to "make writing as easy as breathing" and "stories won't be written? Give me a theme".
AI has undergone iterative learning and is now becoming a popular writing tool. The picture shows a creative picture. (Visual China/Photo)
Today, there are at least 70 AI writing software on the market: they are writing templates, writing proposals, reports, documents, speeches and summaries; They are creative mentors, providing ideas and ideas for writing, helping you revise, continue and expand, and adjust the mood of the article; They are editing, polishing and grading spelling, grammar, translation, checking originality; They are marketing managers who summarize popular types, optimize keywords and content, and increase exposure in search engines.
In February 2023, someone asked on Zhihu: "Will AI writers win the Nobel Prize?" Despite the few respondents, the answer was almost unanimous: "No." ”
Literature is still considered the last bastion of writing. At the 2023 Faulkner Literary Awards, writers brought up the topic again, and the host also used AI to write speeches: Do you think AI can do the job of writers and storytellers? One writer replied: "I don't think anybody's job is safe. ”
"Literature, no more", AI reunited "desperate" writers.
At the eighth session of the 2023 Tongji Youth Humanities Forum, Wu Xiangyu, a professor at Zhejiang Normal University, talked about a past incident in the late 1990s. At that time, the computer had not yet become a creative tool, and the poet Hong asked a friend to make an advanced poetry composition software for him, and he could freely combine a modern new poem by just tapping the Enter key. Hong has submitted her work to many magazines but has been rejected, and this work by the poetry software has been favored by the magazine editors.
Editors wrote back praising "your time." Hong was speechless for a while, falling into a technical myth.
Artificial intelligence is already a contemporary "magic pen". In the story of "Divine Pen Ma Liang", a child named Ma Liang obtains a divine pen and has since had the ability to make paintings come true. In the past, the pen was often considered a symbol of personal talent. In the new story, the divine pen is external to Ma Liang and has a dominant power.
"Such tools are constantly being transformed, and AI creates all kinds of genres," Wu said, "which has had a earth-shaking impact on literature itself." ”
Tools that everyone can use and reach
Over the years, science fiction writer Chen Qiufan has created in a very "science fiction" way.
In 2017, Chen began to participate in the work of language models. Google's colleague Wang Yonggang, a science fiction writer, mainly does technical work, while Chen provides corpus for the model. At that time, language models with limited parameter scale were still far from real writing.
Six years later, Chen lamented that after iterative learning, feedback and self-reinforcement, AI has become "a [tool] that everyone can use and touch."
Video tutorials for writing novels with AI abound nowadays. (Infographic/Figure)
Zhan Yubing, a young associate researcher in the Department of Chinese at Fudan University, said that in a discussion of AI-influenced literature, the discussion of science fiction, detective fiction and other genres of literature is more likely to fall into polarization. On the one hand, proponents believe that genre literature is the easiest to be replaced by AI, and "this kind of patterned writing can be imitated and learned"; On the other hand, opponents and fans of detective novels firmly believe that "secret room tricks, impossible crimes, etc., are the light of human wisdom and whimsy that cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence."
AI writing tools can act as a powerful auxiliary to Chen Qiufan's genre literary creation. For example, Sudowrite, this "story engine" serves the creation of science fiction, fantasy, detective, romance and other genre novels, which can help with world view, characters, technology, plot, story twists and other aspects. Sudowrite has seven styles of romance, thriller, mystery, horror, and technology, which can help writers create content, brainstorm, build characters and plots, and more.
"It can help you discover some of the characters, what kind of routines the plot follows. For example, 'Hero's Journey', a Hollywood script format, has several templates for you to choose from, which can quickly generate a general type story for you. Chen Qiufan told Southern Weekend, "You definitely can't do it exactly, but there will be a lot of inspiration in the process." ”
Chen Qiufan once imagined that after learning all the texts of a historical master, AI can use the master's way of thinking to communicate with people. For example, he wanted to talk to the AI version of Arthur Clark (editor's note, a late famous science fiction author) about an idea and follow the advice of this master.
He also mentioned the help of Midjourney, a famous AI painting tool. When he entered the setting of the character, the AI's work brought him a visual reference, "When I write about this character, what comes to my mind is (AI) portraits, and maybe a lot of interaction will become particularly vivid." ”
Chen repeatedly mentioned to Southern Weekend the "enlightenment" of AI-generated content, "quickly showing you a lot of possibilities and picking your favorite." Human writers are the same, but we may not think as quickly and comprehensively. ”
After collaborating with AI to write, Chen Qiufan felt that some writing inertia such as word and sentence formation, plot direction, and character shaping were gradually broken. Sometimes, AI describes a scene in unimaginable ways. Chen Qiufan enjoys the interaction process with the machine and "jumps out of the routine".
Chen Qiufan told Southern Weekend that human-machine cooperation will also bring "psychological incentives." In the past, he often struggled to take the first step in creation, and the complicated knowledge in his brain needed to be integrated little by little. AI changes this situation, even if the AI-generated outline or template is to be rewritten, overturned, and rewritten, the "psychological barrier" will be much smaller.
The process of human-machine collaborative creation often requires repeated attempts to get results. Chen Qiufan's screenwriter friend gave the AI a setting, which will be specific to the script format, character setting, and make it understand the context. At this time, AI may bring surprises. For example, when writing the sixth episode, the AI suddenly gave a clue that could dock to a certain plot of the fourth episode, "he (the screenwriter) did not think of it himself."
"People's subjective initiative, creativity and imagination still play a very central role in this (AI writing)." Chen Qiufan feels that the writer himself needs to have a clear expectation of creation, "what kind of identity, what style, what way to generate what kind of dialogue", the more detailed the guidance, the better the output.
Although actively embracing AI, Chen Qiufan has limited evaluation of the content currently produced by AI, "it is easier to predict the direction of the plot, and there will be no particularly personal and oblique things." In the past six years, AI has inspired his work, but he admits at this stage that "most of the participation may be for AI to help me collect some information, do some summary or analysis, and specifically write, in terms of text, it is still far away."
The "line of defense" of pure literature
A paper written by academics at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University noted that authors ranked 138th out of 774 jobs in potential impact.
"Do you think AI will write a bestseller in this century?" Southern Weekend asked about ChatGPT.
"While there may be higher levels of AI text generation in the future, writing truly engaging bestsellers may also require a combination of human creativity, emotion, and unique human experiences." ChatGPT told Southern Weekend.
Many writers and scholars believe that "pure literature" is a field that AI cannot conquer for the time being. (Visual China/Photo)
Regarding AI writing, writer Sansan mentioned the story in "Gulliver's Travels".
The utopian designer of the Lagto Academy of Sciences studied how to use mechanical manipulation methods to change people's critical knowledge. Through his methods, even the most ignorant people could write books with tuition and physical effort—apprentices turned the handles of huge machines, and all the words in the language and their different voices, tenses, etc. were recombined to produce new sentences, and these fragmented sentences were eventually pieced together.
At present, the result of AI creating works on its own is just like these sentences pieced together by machines.
In 2017, the writer resigned from Harvest magazine, and then participated in the development of a digital humanities-big data text analysis software. The events, rhythms, mood changes, etc. in the text are converted into procedural language, and the software can draw a conflict curve model. It is said that the curved model was inspired by the American writer Vonnegut. "He asked if I could draw a story with a line, from beginning to end."
Creators can use software to conduct academic research and writing. Relying on AI as a "comprehensive and heavenly reader", Zhan Yubing once "read" 749 Chinese online novels in 12.5 hours, with a total word count of more than 729 million words.
But can writers further learn and master certain writing rules with the help of AI analysis software? Walking towards Southern Weekend, the reporter admitted that it could not be done.
"Our largest training corpus right now is almost entirely web literature, because web literature has clear classifications, there are a large arsenal of trainable languages, and there are a lot of very straightforward computers that recognize and label conversations." Walk around to Southern Weekend reporter. At present, AI has a strong impact on the "strong plot" of routines, but it has never been able to break through the "defense line" of pure literature.
Yu Jingru, a young writer and editor of Harvest magazine, told Southern Weekend: "In the field of pure literature, the story framework is not very important, it may be a foundation, but it is not the standard for determining the quality of a novel. Yu Jingru believes that unlike pure literature, perhaps genre literature emphasizes more on "ideas" and "creativity", which is easier to get the help of AI. In addition, creating a "god turn" is also a strong point of AI.
However, if a good idea is not supported by enough narrative detail, "God Turn" cannot express personal experience and emotional memory, nor can it be called a successful creation. After the emergence of AI writing, it actually tests each writer's ability to link to key information. The subjective parts of human beings, such as feelings, questions, reflections, and self-beings invested in words, are the uniqueness of pure literature. Although the above-mentioned AI analysis software has been able to parse the content and emotions of human works, it has never been able to output these meanings and write the fascinating and amazing parts of literature.
I was reading Chekov's ten volumes recently, and one of them was a short story about a woman's inner feelings of guilt and guilt, "You don't use the language of 'God' at that time, we want to imitate that kind of serious thinking." "All (AI) corpus can only give you language, not what is behind." ”
Walking around, I think of Bi Feiyu's new novel "Welcome to the World", the male protagonist of the novel was a very indifferent person at the beginning, and his mother's hand cut and bleed, he didn't even look at it, he would feel that it had nothing to do with him. "When did such an indifferent person feel that he wanted to save all living beings? One surviving patient knelt before him. In the text, he saw the buildings at night and felt that they were kneeling to him. The author has developed according to this character to the present, and only then has such a stroke, this sentence can not be written by AI. ”
Walking towards Southern Weekend, the reporter showed a passage from the novel, "Fu Rui's fear began to spasm... like mycomycelium".
"It's about doctors, so the metaphor of fear uses mycelium (AI classification is really difficult to be that fine)," Walking said, "The whole psychological description, starting with dashes, is not something that traditional AI can extract." 'To talk. The 'sentence' to be talked about, the inner emotional change from anger to relaxation is almost on this one'. This looping also forms Bi Feiyu's unique narrative style. The dash behind leads to this couple's story, and the transition sentence design AI can't do it. ”
Good literature needs to be "between the lines", it needs metaphors, it needs to "translate" daily life. Walking around and mentioning his own unique writing experience, how do these complex, intimate personal experiences feed the computer? She felt a throbbing for the creative thinking itself, how several clues converged, how did they diverge, when did the power burst? These, AI obviously can't do.
"Writers in the true sense of the word, creative work, there is no way to use AI." Walk around to Southern Weekend reporter.
Challenge literary judges, literary editors
One day in 2019, I walked around and called Chen Qiufan. Walk around and ask, a novel he published in 2018, "Out of Trance", is said to use AI tools? Chen Qiufan replied, yes. At that time, I noticed a passage after the novel: "The part in italics with * is created by the AI program in the style of a deep learning author, without manual modification." ”
After the AI judges "read" all 771 short stories published in 20 literary magazines in mid-2018, "Out of Trance" scored the highest.
The so-called score is the coefficient obtained by AI to evaluate literary works through data analysis, including judging the rhythm change between plots and the smoothness of structure. In other words, AI accurately identifies the traces of another AI in many human works, which is the high mountain and water of the artificial intelligence world.
Chen Qiufan felt that "this is a very sci-fi thing."
Sinan Literary Anthology is also a collaborator on the AI list, and editor-in-chief Huang Dehai expressed interest in the results. In addition to the possibilities of AI in literature. Another reason is that literary rankings, regardless of the results, there are always people who question the professionalism of the judges, or think that the results rely on human favor - "So, a relatively neutral selection criterion would be more fun, right?" ”
At the forum, the poet Konoha said that when the literary prize no longer depends on such and such a famous critic, the editor-in-chief of such and such a magazine, etc., now it is still difficult to predict, because a series of questions will arise - "What is aesthetics, what is literature, what is talent, is there fairness?" ”
Walking around is well aware of the current limitations of AI judges, which can recognize rhythm, narrative strength, neat structure, etc., but cannot distinguish between good and bad language.
Some time ago, Yu Jingru and AI played a writing solitaire game and got a slightly disappointing game result: "It didn't give me the thrill of being able to write a novel, or the feeling of interacting with people." ”
Yu Jingru sets the framework of an absurd story, the plot begins with a child on the way to the village, picking up a pig's leg, and then the child will pick up different parts of the pig every distance he walks, and finally these parts can be put together to form a new life.
This strange setting confuses the AI, which is always looking for a realistic logic and trying to push the story in the direction of reality. "In the process, the story was messed up," Yu told Southern Weekend, "and AI can't justify itself, and it's always rushing to the end." ”
Some illustrations in the magazine began using AI painting techniques. Yu Jingru found that similar to the feedback results of text created by AI, once it slightly involves the human spiritual world or content that violates the logic of reality, AI is powerless, and even makes strange and unaesthetic things.
In short, AI at this stage seems to be of little help to editors like Yu Jingru. Yu Jingru described that if AI is compared to a person, it will be "a person who is very utilitarian, very purposeful, and has a wide range of knowledge, but has no imagination and no creative talent."
Judging from the current professional editor's appraisal of story mode, language and other aspects, AI works are easy to distinguish from human works. Often in the first sentence, senior editors will see "confusion".
But the editors' worries have already begun. Science fiction magazine editors in the United States have begun to receive a large number of fiction works created by AI, and their workload has increased. In February 2023, Neil Clark, editor-in-chief of an American magazine, blogged about a worrying creative trend: there has been a marked surge in "AI stories" submissions. In February, there were seven hundred human submissions and five hundred AI submissions.
"The technology is only going to get better, so detection is going to become more challenging." Clark noted that third-party tools for identifying machine writing are expensive, and the short story market is unaffordable: "It's not going to go away on its own, and I don't have a solution." I'm tinkering with some, but it's not a 'mole fighting' game that anyone can win. ”
Wu Hao, editor and book critic of Shanghai Literature, said that as a front-line editor, he has noticed that AI elements have become more and more popular in the past two years of free drafting. In a novel included in Shanghai Literature, the author creates a world in which everyone can write a praiseworthy poem, and everyone is Li Bai, "Anyone can call any literary genre that exists in the history of the world anytime, anywhere, with the help of AI, with the help of cloud storage." Wu Hao said that he could feel the sense of crisis in the novelist's heart.
Wu Hao believes that the participation of AI can create better literary works in the future, but "the problem now is that I think that the real and excellent literary works (created by AI) that can match the current popularity of AI are still relatively rare." ”
"The human creative process is not fundamentally different from AI"
Regarding AI creation capabilities, there was a discussion as early as 2017. AI "Xiaoice" published the first collection of artificial intelligence Chinese poetry, "Sunlight Lost Glass Window". Before publishing the poetry collection, Xiaoice had published works on major platforms under 27 pseudonyms, and his true identity had never been discovered.
Xiaoice studied the poems of 519 modern Chinese poets since 1920, and after 10,000 iterations of study, finally gained the creativity of modern poetry. The content production results of language models are often fine-tuned by the tuner according to their own aesthetic taste. Xiaoice-style poetry is related to the tastes and poetic preferences of the engineers who train the Xiaoice.
The results of the AI's creation of new poems in Chinese are reminiscent of criticisms of modern poetry. "A lot of new poetry writing is ridiculed as 'the work of knocking the enter key.'" Cao Seng, a young poet and Ph.D. at Fudan University, believes that AI can be used as a kind of language environment detector, according to "spit out things", can "help us find out the situation of language itself".
In a future trend, AI is expected to become part of a writer's everyday tool, Chen Qiufan describes, as simple as everyday use of Word. Chen Qiufan tried AI to co-create a series of works, he will consciously mark which part is created by humans and which part is created by machines, and finally give a signature to express respect for intellectual property rights.
Chen Qiufan told Southern Weekend that there are more authors abroad who use AI for creation, and he knows that several editors-in-chief of magazines in the United States will receive such works - lazy, directly used in large paragraphs, and the format has not been changed.
Wu Hao believes that works will always be the most concerned thing for literary journals and literary editors, "The challenge brought by AI is how human editors can build an AI coefficient for works in the future." Wu Hao said that in the near future, perhaps pure literary journals will sign agreements with authors to eliminate the possibility of AI participation in collaboration, or need to indicate the degree of AI participation.
Wu Hao imagines that for a pure literary magazine, AI can already replace most of the work of human editors, such as basic revision work, "A senior editor may have a very mature group of authors, and your knowledge of this person may help you revise his work." But for free drafts, is it that after the rise of AI in the future, directly put free drafts into AI, and it can tell you whether you can use them in general. ”
In six years of collaborative work, Chen Qiufan was actually entangled in the damage caused by AI to subjectivity and originality at first, but finally concluded that "the human creative process is actually not fundamentally different from AI", and people obtain more modal and higher-dimensional data through the interface.
He read the article "ChatGPT is a blurry image of all text on the Internet" by science fiction author Ted Jiang, author of science fiction "Arrival", "ChatGPT is a vague compressed JPG image of the real world. Human perception of the external world is also compressed by various senses, a deformed distortion, and even deliberate forgetting, and its compression ratio is even more serious than AI. ”
In 2016, a Japanese novel created by artificial intelligence passed the preliminary review of the "Hoshi Shinichi Miniature Novel Literary Award", but did not win the final prize. The novel, titled A Day in the Life of Computer Writing Fiction, reads: "I wriggled with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and excited to continue writing. The day the computer wrote a novel. Computers prioritize pursuing their own pleasures and no longer working for humans. ”
Southern Weekend reporter Zhang Rui
Editor-in-charge: Liu Youxiang