Per reporter Du Wei Ding Zhouyang
A scene from a science fiction movie happened: robots snatched people's jobs, and people launched a counterattack against robots.
The domestic science fiction journal Science Fiction World will issue a notice in April - refusing to accept science fiction created by AI. "What we need is a future story written by people to show people." Raz, editor-in-chief of "Science Fiction World", told the "Daily Economic News" reporter.
Earlier, the well-known American science fiction magazine "Clark World" also temporarily closed the submission channel due to the surge in AI manuscripts.
Is AI threatening the survival of science fiction writers? In the field of web novels, where the volume is huge and the quality is uneven, the air of anxiety is more pronounced. "In the past two years, there have been posts in our forums every day to discuss, when will AI replace artificial codewords?" Tianrui, winner of the Galaxy Award, China's highest science fiction award and chairman of the Jiujiang Internet Writers Association, told reporters, "The experimental results of the generation of AI Caiyun Xiaomeng two years ago were not ideal, but you see that now ChatGPT has been able to do it very freely and harmoniously." ”
Part of the "substitution" has already taken place. Guan Pingchao, the author of the original online writer "The Legend of Sword and Fairy" and the dean of Migu College of Literature, mentioned to reporters that AI Internet celebrities on social media - the artificial image generated by AI original painting technology, if you don't look closely at the three-legged person in the background, you can't see that this is a fake photo.
Once upon a time, creative fields such as painting, music, and literature were considered the last line of defense for AI. Now that magic has become a reality, what kind of shock has AIGC (referring to the use of artificial intelligence technology to generate content) brought to literary creation?
Robots talk to people like people, and the imagination in science fiction works has come true
"We have been looking forward to this day, but we didn't expect it to be so fast and it was so shocking to us." Raz said when chatting with reporters about the popular ChatGPT that an excellent painting AI came out some time ago, and now a powerful dialogue AI has suddenly appeared, "especially under the blessing of film and television dramas adapted from the two sci-fi works of "The Wandering Earth 2" and "The Three-Body Problem", it has given us more stimulation." ”
"This guy has become perfect" and "really knows astronomy and geography", and talking to ChatGPT seems to have become a daily pastime for the public.
Writers also enthusiastically threw questions at it, and one of the reasons for this is that AI, which was originally used as an important creative element of the novel, is now running to reality to try to "break" the last bunker of mankind, will its own job be robbed?
The reporter of "Daily Economic News" interviewed more than ten well-known writers such as Hao Jingfang, Raz, Tianrui Shuofu, Yuanpu, Guan Pingchao, Squid Who Loves Diving, Pei Bu, Shitori Village, Morning Star LL, etc., and found that most writers have an inclusive attitude towards ChatGPT and are willing to try to use it in their own writing.
"If verification can participate in the creation of web novels, the use of new technologies is not excluded." Pei, who wrote masterpieces such as "Please Gongzi Cut the Demon", did not say.
"I personally am happy to see it, because literary creators are different from AI, and they do not pursue optimal solutions." The squid, vice chairman of the Sichuan Provincial Writers Association and writer of the Literature Group, who loves diving, told reporters.
Hao Jingfang, winner of the Hugo Award, the world's highest award in science fiction literature, told reporters that from the perspective of science fiction authors, the development of ChatGPT is great, "It has taken the first small step of a long sequence in our long expectations." This step is that robots can talk to humans, just like people, which is very good, and there is still a certain distance from the dialogue with AI that we imagine in science fiction works. ”
"After AI can talk to people, there are still many steps to go, such as generating its own goals and plans; Mobilize some resources yourself and integrate many other functions. These are coming one after another, and as for the awakening of self-consciousness and the control of the world, it is all farther, farther and farther imagination. So now ChatGPT may be the first three steps in a hundred steps, and we are still looking forward to the follow-up development. Hao Jingfang said.
Writer Yuanpu Yuan, who has written well-known sci-fi web articles such as "Deep Sea Ember", believes that it is even possible to combine ChatGPT and AI drawing, so that AI can help generate intuitive sketches of story scenes to assist scene thinking when writing.
ChatGPT believes that it can help writers to carry out literary creation and improve the quality and level of their works.
"ChatGPT may replace some authors. In the future, the field of literature will also be seriously divided. Hao Jingfang said that there were not many people who could write things before, everyone would look at his works, and with the assistance of science and technology, many people may write stories in the future, not only many humans can write, but also many AIs. In the future, the author will write his own, and the reader's preferences will also be differentiated, some people love to read what AI writes, some people love to read what people write, and the reading market will be divided into infinite fragments. ”
ChatGPT creation is still mediocre, but it's just the beginning
ChatGPT can imitate Lu Xun, Du Fu, Shakespeare and other styles to write quickly, but when writers start a "conversation" with them, their brains are often beyond our imagination.
For the writing level of ChatGPT, writers pay special attention to. Morning Star LL, the diving squid both "cut the point", testing its ability to write stories.
"Writing is different from painting, there may be multiple consecutive scenes and stories in a chapter of a novel, and it is difficult to distill the whole story with key words." Morningstar LL commented after reading ChatGPT's propositional short story.
To the squid who loves diving, ChatGPT's writing seems "calm". "It mainly works together what it thinks is best based on the database, and human writers are not necessarily, because they will be affected by the mood and 'chance encounter' of the day or this time, maybe just because of a sudden quarrel with a friend, or eat delicious, there will be different choices for the development of the plot, which is rooted in personal unique life experience, all accidental things, AI unless it can monitor your life throughout the process, otherwise the two sides are still very different."
Using ChatGPT to collect writing materials is what most writers such as Pei Buju, Guan Pingchao, and Tianrui Shuofu believe that ChatGPT's strength at this stage. Yuanpu and Tianrui both pointed out that in terms of information collection, ChatGPT gives better answers than search engines.
Guan Pingchao told reporters, "I asked ChatGPT to write a revenge story outline about 'a beautiful woman', and it surprised me. Although it is still mediocre in terms of the writing industry, this is just the beginning. Give me some angles about 'beauty' that I hadn't even thought of before, and that will enrich our creative content. ”
However, some writers told reporters that collecting information cannot be done by others, and they are worried that the content abandoned by ChatGPT may be igniting their own new inspiration.
How to strengthen interaction with fans is another hot topic for writers to chat with ChatGPT.
Even writers want to ask ChatGPT to help market new works, and even the problem of increasing followers is left to it to think about.
Hitomi wondered if ChatGPT would pass the Turing test.
He found that asking ChatGPT professional questions in a very simple language could get the most consistent answer to the question after intelligent integration.
The writer Shitorimura, whose works such as "The Great Doctor Ling Ran" are in the permanent collection of the National Library, currently mainly asks ChatGPT to do some scene descriptions or some patterned suggestions. "It can only write relatively short content, and I personally feel that it is equivalent to the level of the third and fourth grades of primary school."
Hao Jingfang's test is mainly to see if ChatGPT can handle some work for her, "My company needs a lot of customer service operations, I want to train such AI to replace some employees, and I want to use AI for sales in the future." In addition, I also care about marketing copywriting, if AI can write copy, we don't have to hire people anymore. ”
Hao Jingfang said that he will use ChatGPT as an archival tool and search assistant, "provided that the knowledge information it provides is accurate in the future, then it can replace me to do some retrieval work." ”
As for writing novels, Hao Jingfang did not try to let Chat GPT do it for her. "I'm going to go into the inner experience of a character, his pain and struggle, his ideals and persistence. I have to feel the emotions of this character in my heart first, and then write these emotions out in my words, so in this case, it is of no use to me to let the AI help me write the storyline. ”
For example, Hao Jingfang is about to write a chapter about a hero and his controlling mother. The mother used the sick way to get the hero to agree to some requests. At this time, every word of his conversation with his mother was painful, kind, unwilling and resistant... These things can't be written by ChatGPT. ”
AI can imitate style very well, but it can't restore long logic
Almost all writers who ask ChatGPT questions will mention its ability to look up information.
"Especially some of the more unfamiliar materials - you can ask ChatGPT in a very simple language, and it can intelligently integrate the answer. For example, when writing about the customs and habits of a certain ethnic group in a certain era, conventional search engines often can only adapt according to keywords, and the final thing found does not match well, and advertisements often pop up. Yuanpu said to reporters.
Tianrui, a science fiction writer at Literature Group, said that Fu tried writing speeches using ChatGPT. "For that kind of normative, patterned, well-defined, boxed thing, it's done well."
In Tianrui's view, ChatGPT will develop into a production aid like a keyboard in the future. "People who can't use AI-assisted codewriting in a few years may be like people who can't type on computers now."
But they also generally recognize ChatGPT's "nonsense." "For example, if you ask it to evaluate the acting skills of an actor, it talks a lot, but it's not about this person at all."
"ChatGPT is particularly good at serious nonsense. I don't know how to pretend to understand, and I forcibly talk awkwardly. Tianrui said, "It can also talk about problems that it doesn't understand at all, and the head of the way you talk to." It's AI after all, but saying something completely wrong in a very confident manner and tone can completely mislead you if you don't have the discernment to believe it. ”
"A lot of what it provides is inaccurate and not omniscient." Hao Jingfang also pointed out, but she also found its potential in conversations with ChatGPT.
Hao Jingfang told reporters that she used a Chinese version of the underlying model based on ChatGPT to make Chinese robot, do you know what "chicken baby" is. "Die laughing! A chicken baby is a hen's baby. It fully exposes that this robot is only a foreign robot that can say Chinese, and has not yet integrated into the fertile soil of Chinese society. Then Hao Jingfang's words changed, "However, with its IQ, as long as you chat more with Chinese mothers and absorb a lot of local corpus to feed, I believe that you will soon be able to learn the essence of Chinese-style chicken dolls, and maybe it can give you a super detailed 'extracurricular training course guide'." ”
In addition to checking the information, the language style can also be learned. Liu Xingliang, a digital economist and author, asked ChatGPT to imitate Lu Xun's tone and write an essay.
"Isn't that feeling a little bit there?" Liu Xingliang said that people who code know that writers will form their own style. The algorithm of artificial intelligence can read a large number of words of a writer with a prominent style, pick up the salient words and the interrelationships between the words, and perform similar output after analysis.
Yuanpu believes that AI can well imitate the author's "style", such as common words, common phrases or rhetorical devices and other content that can be achieved by "mechanical training", but can not restore the long logic and sensibility in the human thinking process, AI can write the beginning or middle fragment of a story, but it is not yet possible to achieve a complete plot chain. At this stage, it can only serve as a green basic tool, and I hope that in the future it can truly become an intelligent assistant for creators and participate more in the birth process of works.
Don't let the day when people's creations become intangible cultural heritage
"On the 18th, on a snowy night, an off-road vehicle carrying several 'madmen' of HKUST, Xu Siqing, Li Ya, Xiong Hui, Huang Wang, and Dai Ruoli went through several twists and turns on the snow road and 'killed' to the quiet Miyun Beizhuang Heban Villa. They came for ChatGPT. Guan Pingchao forwarded the "Global HKUST Alumni ChatGPT Forum" gathering held by the USTC Alumni Venture Capital Forum that he witnessed with his own eyes, "The invisible airwaves started from the Netherlands and brought together alumni around the world. ”
Guan Pingchao, who remains optimistic about the progress of science and technology, believes that the use of ChatGPT, at first glance, lowers the threshold for web literature, but in fact increases. "Online literature is full of routine articles and fast food articles, and primary school students can sign up to become online writers. After the popularization of AIGC, it will be difficult for them to sign a contract, and people don't need this. The requirements for the 'web writer god' are also higher, and the works that could be sold in the past with 60 points are now raised to 80 points and 85 points. ”
"There are indeed legal issues in this, such as letting AI write articles, who is the copyright? AI absorbs so much data to obtain the writing ability, so should it pay those data parties? Tianrui said.
It's like a black box, are we feeding a helper or a monster?
Raz worries, "The scary thing about it is that every test we test it is to help it grow." It collects a lot of data and hundreds of millions of people have trained it, and each of us has our own uniqueness, so it can observe the diversity of all human groups, and it also has a very deep understanding of all of us. ”
ChatGPT will know more about humans than all the smart machines of the past, but how much do we know about it? "Nothing is known." Raz says even developers know nothing about its "black box."
"Now we're so actively involved in testing it, helping it grow and iterate quickly, and the next result is that we have personally trained him to become a replacement in his own industry." Raz said, "For example, many people are now concerned about the game industry, and there are already friends around who are worried that they will be replaced as game artists. But the deeper impact behind this is actually the change of related professional education, and who will apply for these majors in the future? ”
Science fiction writers imagine that AI frees up labor to do more creative things. And this beautiful vision may backfire, it is entirely possible that AI does creative work of painting and writing, and people just do boring, boring, and uncreative "review and picking" work.
"Although this is not a real battle between humans and AI, it is something we need to think about and reflect. With the advent of the AI era, the total amount of information will increase explodingly, but the amount of effective information, such as the number of excellent works represented by truth, goodness and beauty, will not necessarily increase the same. Hao Jingfang said that we humans have a very good information discrimination and information screening mechanism, "will forget a lot, forgetting is to delete a lot of information from our human brain, every day when we sleep we will 'wash the brain', clean up again, to ensure that the human brain remains, for us, are the most valuable content." ”
It is precisely because human beings have the ability to judge what is good and great literature. The more so, Raz believes that people's writing is more important now. "The risk of machine creation is to attack human creativity, once a large number of people in the early stage of creation give up creation, how many great works can be expected to be born? If people give up their own innovation, they will switch roles with machines. It would be a pity if one day everything that people wrote became intangible cultural heritage. ”
If AI literature is flooded, how can human writers defend their creative achievements? "Defeat magic with magic. A relatively good way to deal with it is that we can prevent problems through legislation or industry norms and require the labeling of AI-created works. Raz told reporters that this is similar to many things today, "Playing the brand of handmade, even if the handmade production is not as good as the machine production, but we can feel the value of the people behind it." ”
Raz believes that "labeling is to respect people's creations. In the future, there may be some shortcomings in the creation of human authors, but they are full of this author's thinking about human beings, and what AI writes is always just a fragment of a program. ”