What is often called artificial intelligence, or AI, is first and foremost a money-making, resource-extractive industry. It is heavily publicly subsidized and supported by industrial, political, military, as well as educational institutions. As such, as media scholar Crawford writes, “AI systems are built to see and intervene in the world in ways that primarily benefit the states, institutions, and corporations that they serve.”
One way these AI systems benefit the institutions they serve is to train ways of thinking and feeling—or rather ways of unthinking and unfeeling—which are saturated by the logics of dominant institutions. Consequently, AI systems will only exacerbate, not alleviate, the crisis of narration we have been witnessing. It is misguided to rely on AI systems to tell the rich and complex stories of people’s social, religious, cultural, political and everyday experiences and aspirations. History shows that only people, not the institutions and technologies which govern them, can tell their own stories.
Yet the AI industry has its undisguised ambitions of telling our stories for us. Baidu’s AI chatbot, called ERNIE bot in English (short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration), is sometimes considered a Chinese rival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Its Chinese name Wenxin yiyan (文心一言), borrowed directly from Liu Xie’s (465-522) Wenxin Diaolong (文心雕龙), conveys its storytelling ambition with no ambiguity.
Sometimes compared to Aristotle’s Poetics, Wenxin Diaolong is the most important theoretical treatise on literary and non-literary writing in ancient China. Whether translated as Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind or The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, the “mind” in the English translations is at most an inadequate approximation of the original xin (心), which refers to both the human heart and the mind, both human feelings and thoughts.
The fundamental difference between Baidu’s “Wenxin” and Liu Xie’s “Wenxin” lies in their relationship to the human. For Liu Xie, literature and writings are expressions of xin, the heart-mind. They arise from their authors’ lived experiences and emotional engagement with the world. The best writings convey those experiences powerfully and vividly, as if they themselves were living persons. In fact, Qian Zhongshu argued in 1937 that Liu Xie humanizes writing to the extent that he views a piece of writing “as a living person of our own kind”—with voice, breath, musculature and integument.
We do not need to go as far as Liu Xie’s humanizing impulse to understand that powerful storytelling depends on human imagination, emotions, and sensibilities of the heart-mind. It is tempting, however, to consult Liu Xie about his views of writing driven by AI systems. What would he say about today’s AI-driven writing?
I posed this question to ChatGPT and Baidu’s chatbot app Wenxin (文心), literally “Literary heart-mind.” The responses I received reveal interesting differences, but they agree on one point. To their credit, they both acknowledge that AI systems (i.e. themselves) may excel in producing polished prose, but AI writing lacks the heart-mind that is essential in Liu Xie’s conception of human writing. In fact, for Liu Xie, excessive embellishments are a symptom of the sickness of a piece of writing. In discussing the implications of these responses, I argue that AI-driven writing may hold a mirror up to reveal the singularities of writings of the human heart-mind, thus reaffirming the meaning and significance of human storytelling.
