AI can write, but without a 'why', it can't live stories

When I found out I'd be speaking at the Beijing International Book Fair on AI's role in creativity and literature, I thought about it — then I asked AI what it thought about it.

DeepSeek suggested: "Think of it like a painter using brighter pigments. The technology expands possibilities but doesn't replace the hand holding the brush."

I don't know if I could have said it better myself. And that's exactly the question — both at hand and in the cloud.

I joined the onstage roundtable discussion shortly after winning the Special Book Award of China, the top literary honor the country gives foreigners for their contributions to literary exchanges between China and the rest of the world. It's a lifetime award for the nearly 20 books about China I've written, coauthored, edited or co-compiled from 2008 to 2021, before AI seeped into our daily lives.

While I have increasingly started to use AI for technical assistance, mostly brainstorming and proofreading, I find that if I prompt it to write or rewrite, I typically dislike most of the results.

For now, at least.

I may borrow inspiration from a suggested word or phrase here or there, and occasionally pluck out a recommended simile or metaphor, keeping only a kernel of its essence and totally transforming it into something else virtually unrecognizable from its raw form.

That said, while the words and ideas might be over 90 percent my own by the time they have evolved into their final form, I may not have stumbled upon their undifferentiated potential without AI's prompt.

Its suggestions are like clay — I might retain a phrase or metaphor, but reshape it into something unrecognizable from its original form. I mold, glaze and fire them into vessels of meaning that are truly mine.

We often think about giving AI prompts. We should also think about how AI prompts us.

But I don't know how this will change or how quickly.

I recall that, a couple of years ago, I wrote a speech for the World Internet Forum in Wuzhen about the "digital Belt and Road" that was bursting with personal experiences and lyrical zing.

As an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to write a speech using prompts that were essentially the same that I'd given myself when brainstorming. It spit out a drowsy speech, heaving under the weight of platitudes, and devoid of personal experience and pizzazz.

But, oh! How far AI has come since then!

This question is interesting. But it will become much more interesting in just a couple of years from now.

Cooperation? Competition? Symbiosis?

The beginning of utopia? The end of the world?

There's so little we can predict with certainty.

One thing is for sure: It will still be a long time until AI can actually have lived experiences to write about — if ever.

It can't feel the jolting fear of that landslide punching that van I was riding in, nearly flicking it off a serpentine dirt road gripping a mountainside. It can't feel the guilt of spending birthdays at a mass grave I narrowly escaped thanks to a last-minute schedule change. It can't find the absurd amusement in being an American buying yaks on the "roof of the world" or buying books from an illiterate bookseller in the dark on the "planet's third pole".

These are visceral and require a body — and more.

Even if AI goes beyond enriching hues and learns how to hold the brush, it will need a "why".

And that intentionality, perhaps, can only come from a soul.