Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin, author of The Three-Body Problem, uses ChatGPT to craft speech, expects AI to replace 'some human work'
China's most famous science-fiction writer, Liu Cixin, said he used ChatGPT to help compose his recent public speech, which reinforced his belief about the potential of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to replace certain human activity.
"ChatGPT, of course, will make an impact on human existence and society, but its influence won't result in AI-ruled humans like what happens in science fiction," Liu told Michael Yu Minhong, founder of New Oriental Education & Technology Group, in a live-streamed interview on May 31.
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On using ChatGPT for his recent public speech, Liu said: "I was running out of time ... and it did very well."
Liu is not the first celebrity Chinese author to seek help from AI to help write a speech.
Earlier last month, Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan - known for novels such as Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads and The Republic of Wine - shocked the crowd at a literary event in Shanghai, where he revealed that he used ChatGPT to write a speech praising fellow author Yu Hua.
Like Liu's predicament, time constraints prompted Mo to turn to ChatGPT.
"A few days ago, I was supposed to write a commendation for him as per tradition, but I struggled for several days and couldn't come up with anything," Mo said. "So I asked a doctoral student to help me by using ChatGPT."
These actions of Liu and Mo underscore potential demand for domestic ChatGPT-like services on the mainland, where US start-up OpenAI has not yet made available its popular AI chatbot.
Many Chinese tech companies have already jumped on the large language model (LLM) bandwagon to tap into this market opportunity. An LLM - the technology behind ChatGPT - is a deep-learning algorithm that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate text and other content based on knowledge gained from massive data sets.
Chinese institutions have so far launched at least 79 LLMs with more than 1 billion parameters, a measure of the size and complexity of a model, according to a report by the government research agency Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China.
Online search provider Baidu, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, AI firm SenseTime and voice recognition developer iFlyTek have each introduced their own alternative domestic services to ChatGPT, which took the world by storm after its launch in November. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
In a separate live-streamed interview with both New Oriental's Yu and Chinese live-streaming star Dong Yuhui on May 31, Liu indicated that overall developments in technology have lagged far behind those portrayed in published science fiction.
"The only field that is close to what was predicted in science fiction is [current] information technology, such as the internet and artificial intelligence," Liu said.
Liu also suggested that billionaire Elon Musk, chief executive of electric vehicle maker Tesla who recently visited China, is very much like a person who came from science fiction. "His logical thinking and commitment [to space exploration] are very similar to that of the core spirit of science fiction," he said.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
