Students' response to AI vs humanity moves millions

When artificial intelligence brings unprecedented convenience, what makes humanity valuable? A group of high school students in southern China offered their answers — and moved millions of people.

Yu Yaxuan, a Chinese language teacher at Shenzhen Nanshan Foreign Language School (Group) in Guangdong province, recently collected 54 questionnaires from her students, posing a single question:"Prove you're not an AI with one Chinese character. What would you choose?"

The students' responses surprised Yu and later impressed a wide audience after a video about the exercise went viral online, sparking heated discussion on the meaning of being human.

One unexpected answer was "mother". A student explained that it is "the first word most humans learn and a symbol of protective magic. Parents are the last line of defense between us and death. But robots don't have one."

Two students offered seemingly opposite answers: "urgent" and" slow".

"Robots don't understand why humans are always in a hurry," one student wrote. "It takes 30 minutes for a hospital to issue test results, so why do patients check every few minutes? Humans do not live in purely objective time. Our experience of time is shaped by emotion."

Another student, surnamed Wu, argued the opposite. "Speed and efficiency are synonymous with AI, yet humans long to slow down with those they care about," Wu wrote. "AI endlessly pursues speed and accuracy, but I wish for humans to walk slowly, speak slowly and grow up slowly. I am willing to waste time on things that make life beautiful."

Other students chose words such as "doubt" and "limit".

"Will AI doubt its creator?" one student asked.

Another wrote: "AI is infinite, but everything about me is finite — the knowledge I've learnt, the people I've met, the stories I've heard, my life and my time. AI is valuable because it is infinite, while I am even more precious because I am finite."

"I" reflected self-awareness, "pain" expressed a sense of existence, while "hatred" was described as a complex mix of contradictory emotions — one of the most extreme and sincere human feelings. Ten students selected that character.

Other answers included "courage", "faith", "soul", "regret", "love" and "obsession".

"The question's real intention is to inspire introspection," Yu said. "AI is like a clear mirror, reflecting those distinctly human moments we easily overlook because they seem ordinary — hesitation, clumsiness and impulsiveness."

"The goal is not to fall into a simplistic debate over whether humans or AI are superior," she added, "but to use this mirror to reach the deeper, more precious layers of our humanity."

Yu chose the character "you" for herself, quoting a line from the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong,"The world is yours, and it is also ours, but in the end, it is yours."She said the future will be "written by young minds, seen through their clear eyes and created by hands as nimble as theirs".

Yu posted a video of her class discussion on video-sharing platform Bilibili, where it received 6.7 million views, 364,000 likes and 36,000 comments. Many viewers praised the students' depth of thought and shared their own answers.

As AI usage spreads rapidly across industries, humans are becoming increasingly intertwined with the technology. China's annual Chinese language review named "DeepSeek", a homegrown AI model, as the country's phrase of the year for 2025.

"We live in an era swept by fast-moving technological waves," Yu said. "We enjoy the convenience AI brings, but we also feel anxiety. What truly moves people may not be a single class, but the faint glimmers of humanity revealed in these answers — glimmers that cannot be erased by digitalization."

Student Wang said she is not worried about being replaced by AI.

"I shape purpose, while AI is shaped by purpose," she said. "AI is always answering, but humans are always questioning."