After the publication of the Chinese and composition test questions for the college entrance examination this year, various artificial intelligences represented by Baidu digital person Du Xiaoxiao opened the offline answering mode and staged an AI talent group show.
Humans, technology and machines have never been so closely related. When artificial intelligence is deeply integrated with more and more industrial fields, the addition of writing robots has added more imagination to the field of literary creation.
However, as the commercialization of AI writing opens wider and wider, is AI, which has been regarded as an intruder by the public opinion field since it tried text creation, really capable of competing with professional writers?
Du Xiaoxiao scored 48 points in college entrance examination composition
AI writing involves a number of artificial intelligence technologies such as natural language processing, data mining, and knowledge graphs. Influenced by training data, model architecture, and training strategies, artificial intelligence writing styles vary.
How does AI write?
Baidu technicians introduced that AI writing is the automatic analysis, processing and processing of text through natural language processing technology, natural language generation technology and data mining, machine learning, knowledge graph and other AI technologies, so as to generate a relatively complete text. article.
The application of AI to text creation is nothing new. With the substantial improvement in text generation capabilities, AI writing covers more and more fields, and the creative forms and contents become more colorful.
The first field that attracted widespread public attention was poetry creation. Although the initial works were inevitably rough, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate short texts has been remarkable.
In 2017, two things related to AI writing swiped.
This year, Professor Sun Maosong, the academic leader of the Natural Language Processing and Social Humanities Computing Laboratory of Tsinghua University, led the team to develop the "Nine Songs" Chinese poetry automatic generation system, which ranked first in CCTV's large-scale technology challenge program "Extraordinary Wisdom" The stage of the season, and the contemporary outstanding young poets compete on the same stage.
Conversational artificial intelligence Microsoft Xiaoice has also published a collection of poems "Sunshine Lost Glass Window".
However, for a long period of time, AI has written short texts with relatively fixed structures.
Until 2020, when the powerful language model GPT-3 appeared, this situation was broken. Relying on this model, AI had a satisfactory performance in imitation writing and logical deduction, and AI long text creation began to make great progress.
Even so, long text writing such as college entrance examination essays is still a big challenge to AI.
Teacher Shen Yi, who has more than 20 years of teaching experience, served as the leader of the Chinese grading team for the Beijing College Entrance Examination. She scored 48 points for Du Xiaoxiao's composition. From the past years, less than 25% of the candidates who scored 48 points or above in the composition score.
Xiao Yang, vice president of Baidu Group, regards Du Xiaoxiao's "achievement" as the "college entrance examination clearance" of AI technology. In his opinion, Du Xiaoxiao's ability test verifies that technology is no longer a shortcoming of AI-created content.
It is understood that based on China's first self-developed, open source and open industrial-level deep learning platform Fei Pao, Baidu's Wenxin series of large models with "knowledge enhancement" capabilities have reached the world's leading level.
Xiao Yang said: "With the blessing of Baidu Wenxin's large model, Du Xiaoxiao can widely and freely 'quote scriptures and classics' after 'exploring books' and output high-quality composition content."
Baidu technicians revealed that in order to be more in line with the style of college entrance examination argumentative essays, Baidu has fine-tuned the model essay data for the college entrance examination, and used the artificial intelligence essay scorer to score multiple candidate essays generated by the model, and select the one with the highest quality. Only then has Du Xiaoxiao's screen-swiping composition.
Into the commercialization stage resistance begins to disappear
"Release manpower from tedious and repetitive work links and invest in higher-value work", when AI writing entered commercialization, it showed the same slogan as when it entered other fields.
The industry generally believes that although the current AI creation is still relatively rudimentary, it has shown application prospects in news, advertising, design, painting, games and other fields. With the continuous development and iteration of technology, the large-scale application of AI creation is worth looking forward to.
Nowadays, the commercial atmosphere of AI creation in China is strong, and various online platforms regard it as a business with considerable development potential, and AI intelligent writing software or tools emerge in an endless stream.
Baidu is the most optimistic about the commercial prospects of AI creation. In their view, AI creation will enter the stage of large-scale commercial use this year.
Although AI often defeats human opponents in competitive competitions, writing is not an easy task for AI. Compared with humans, AI still has obvious deficiencies in the ability to understand content semantics.
Backed by a large pre-trained model, AI already has strong understanding and generation capabilities, and can automatically generate AI paintings, AI songs, AI clips and other creative works.
However, big models still make a lot of low-level mistakes.
Baidu technicians admitted that from the perspective of the quality of the generated content, the artificial intelligence model is easy to generate some "car wheel words", and no one is excellent in the expression and logical connection of writing emotions.
In order to output more user-friendly content, it is necessary to continuously optimize the quality of training corpus, and innovate algorithm strategies and model architectures to generate works with richer emotions and more self-consistent logic.
Although the application has yet to be perfected, the rapid technological progress of AI writing has attracted people's attention, and the resistance to entering the commercialization stage has begun to disappear.
Baidu's general model has opened the AI creation API interface to the public. Even people who do not know much about AI technology can use a simple interface to obtain the ability to create compositions, press releases, novels, copywriting, rewrite, and correct errors. 's blessing.
Some people regard Baidu's move as market education, and some people regard it as a technology benefit, but in the final analysis, it is actually AI writing that removes technical barriers and releases its capabilities to ordinary people.
The anxiety of being replaced by AI is still there
During the college entrance examination last year, Xu Qingyuan, deputy director of the Online Literature Creation Committee of the Shandong Writers Association, believed that as long as there is enough big data, AI's literary writing will defeat humans.
When AI's creative capabilities are doubled, the discussion about the future of industry practitioners will turn to the left and to the right.
Some people think that AI writing is a "killer" application with huge prospects. The living space of writers is severely backlogged, and they will not even be able to survive in front of AI.
Some people think that, as a tool, no matter how powerful artificial intelligence is, it will never be able to write more vivid and creative literary works than humans.
Although the role of artificial intelligence technology in the digital economy era has long been unquestionable, the anxiety of "being replaced" always exists.
Now, have literary and artistic creations, which have always been reserved for human beings, have begun to fall?
In response to this question, Ding Lieyun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, once answered: "Artificial intelligence cannot completely replace human labor, repetitive labor is easy to be replaced, and work in harsh environments should be replaced, but creative work is difficult to be replaced by Instead, because our inspiration for people is difficult to model."
After all, the current AI creation is still largely limited by the setting of modes and parameters, while human thinking modes and various feelings about social reality are difficult to follow.
It is for this reason that a large number of people firmly believe that discovering and defining problems is the unique ability and competitiveness of human beings, and AI does not yet have this "hidden intelligence".
Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, often said that iFLYTEK's historical mission is to "make machines listen and speak, understand and think, and use artificial intelligence to build a better world".
This vision and goal is the general expectation of the industry. Although the college entrance examination composition has performed well, AI still has a long way to go to become a writer.
From some past tests, people's love for poetry created by AI is significantly lower than that of human works.
In this wave of AI writing essays for the college entrance examination, there are still common defects in AI works, such as logical confusion, blindly dropping book bags, and general performance in emotion and ideological depth.
Kai-Fu Lee once said: "Don't panic too much about the existence of AI. After AI replaces this repetitive labor of humans, it frees humans from tedious production activities, and can have greater creativity and create more Interesting cultural entertainment, so as to better meet the needs of people themselves.”
The same is true of AI writing, at least for now, it's just a little helper for humans.
Our reporter Liu Yan