Pen is still mightier than AI

Writers take a unified stand that though technology is powerful, it cannot beat humans' 'firsthand' experience, Yang Yang reports.

For a contemporary writer, the real crisis is not really AI, it is that readers are giving up their right to read and think, said Malaysian writer Li Zishu at a recent forum about Literary Trends in the Age of AI at Beijing Normal University.

Li said that she came across several posts on Xiaohongshu, or Red-Note, a social media platform, about her best-selling novel Liu Su Di (Worldly Land). To her surprise, she found that neither had she written some excerpts in those posts nor did they appear in her book.

"When sharing their reading insights online, those bloggers are surprisingly relying on artificial intelligence to write for them. What's troubling is that they did not even notice that some of the quotes they were posting are not from the book at all."