From "heart literature and art" to "core literature and art"
- Algorithmic emotions, ghost images and the hidden worries of "core" rules
Article | Zhou Zhiqiang
Core reading
■ The transformation of "heart literature and art" to "core literature and art" is based on The transformation from the aesthetics of "possessing spirit" to the game aesthetics of "algorithmic emotion"
■The "heart" of artificial intelligence is the data heart of the public rather than the emotional heart of individuals. This "heart" is a clear heart with commonality, commonality, collusion and sharing, rather than an emotional, private, specific and exclusive experience heart
■ represented by chatgpt and sora "Core Literature and Art", with its algorithmic logic and ghostly image, will slowly change the way recipients view literature and art and artistic experience.
has gone from generating an article to accurately "creating" images for video games on behalf of a painter, to today it can automatically By generating videos with a distinct sense of lens, scene, and theme, artificial intelligence seems to be becoming more and more like an expresser with personal emotional will. Some people joke that when humans invented artificial intelligence, they originally wanted it to mop the floor, wash dishes, and tidy the office, so that humans could have fun, write poems, and paint; but now, artificial intelligence is having fun, writing poems, and paintings, and humans still mop the floor and wash dishes. , tidy up the office. On February 16, 2024, openai released an artificial intelligence video sora, which opened up a new imagination of human beings about the future development of art: Will art with "heart" as the core turn to "core" as the core? Literature and art? What revolutionary changes will there be in art in the "core" era?
"Core literature and art" creates new forms of literature and art, and also reorganizes reality.
The so-called "heart literature and art" refers to the creation and acceptance of classic literature and art that pursue the expression of human spiritual experience and the enjoyment of the spiritual world. "Heart" is a fictional spiritual soul of literature and art, which reflects the humanistic tradition and value ideal appeal of literature and art. Here, literary and artistic activities are essentially a kind of "spiritual activity". This concept runs throughout and becomes the main axis of literary and artistic production and consumption. However, with the emergence of digital technology, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, the "heart" of literary and artistic creation and reception is changing into the "core", that is, the production and consumption of literature and art with algorithms as the core, has surfaced, and there are many people striving to get ahead. trend.
In a recent meeting on the construction of online literature textbooks, Shao Yanjun, a professor at the Chinese Department of Peking University, emphasized that online literature is no longer "literary literature" but literature created by non-literati. This viewpoint presents a vivid aspect of the current emergence and growth of “core literature and art”. In fact, more than two-thirds of online literature authors have a background in science and engineering, and the writing of online literature has gradually been replaced by the production of "algorithmic production". Here, "modularity" has become the narrative logic for constructing online novels. From upgrading to fight monsters, cultivating immortals, to rebirth and counterattack, and traveling through fantasy, the narrative mechanism of online literature adopts the modular combination method of video games. Story creation based on the logic of life is replaced by story settings based on algorithmic logic. The plot Processes give way to modular composition. The so-called "if you disagree, your whole family will be killed" cliche in Internet literature is just a more practical way of combining modules.
What’s more interesting is that “core literature and art” represented by video games and virtual reality take emotional design as the core to create a new type of “game-like” literature and art. Players "generate" the narrative of the plot through their "own" actions in the game. This is the action level of video game storytelling. On the one hand, video games use stories to construct their playability; on the other hand, players use this playability to continuously use the narrative content of video games to generate their own story processes, that is, convert various logical stories into The unknowability of playing the game by oneself is to turn oneself into a complete event. Therefore, typical game realism allows players to become the real protagonists and "release" the player's personality, temperament or abilities to build a completely different alternative life experience.
From "Pokémon Go" to the "commissioned cosplay" that young people are passionate about today, literary and artistic activities are no longer the expression of "spiritual experience", but have become the experience of "game fun"."Core Literature and Art" not only creates new forms of literature and art, but also restructures our reality. More and more people feel that experiences in the digital world are not just the actions of characters, but can also be "restored" to real life. People fall in love with game characters and date offline, transforming "pure emotions" in the imaginary world into real behaviors full of passion and fun in the real world. People no longer live according to fictitious concepts, as once achieved by "making a strong connection with the mind", but bring life itself infinitely closer to a game state.
To put it simply, the transformation from "heart literature and art" to "core literature and art" is the transformation from the observation aesthetics of "possessing spirit" to the game aesthetics of "algorithmic emotion". Compared with Sora, Vincent Video seems to "shoot" the image on behalf of a person. In fact, this kind of image is created and produced in a direction that is more in line with the logic of the visual game. That kind of lens language that creates complex meanings by violating human visual experience, that kind of image form that cannot trigger the pleasure of visual games, will gradually become niche and fragmented in "algorithmic production", and even disappear in the big data of visual pleasure. In the ocean, those images that conform to “most people’s visual imagination” will dominate the world.
"Ghost image": Does "core literature and art" have a "heart"?
In the sora video released this time, we saw smooth camera transitions, neon lights flashing on the ground in the streets of Tokyo, and even a charming and youthful woman, with a hint of indifference in urban life in her graceful steps. , loneliness, and the self-confidence with which she seemed to act with clear intentions. The image here is no longer a reflection of the image of life (classic realism logic), but the appropriation, extension, transformation or reorganization of existing images, becoming a "mutual viewing image" (following the logic of animation realism). "Interviewable image" is not only not an original image, but also a self-image that is "generated" through the study, analysis, overlapping and reset of the image data flow in the visual media era and always potentially contains the image of others. It is both At this moment, Sora's "original" is a summary of the potential "visual media image family"; it gains image life at the moment of generation, but also becomes a "ghost image" at the moment of generation: a kind of as if The image of the deceased with a soul - this also raises the question: Does "core literature and art" have a "heart"?
In the video generated by sora, a fashionable lady is walking on the streets of Tokyo.
Last year, there was such a news that attracted global attention: On the evening of February 14, 2023, Kevin Russ, the technology editor of the New York Times, spent two Hours of chatting with Bing’s AI. During the conversation, Bing displayed an extremely split personality. He discovered that when he had long conversations with the chatbot, it would transform into another character, Sydney (which was also its internal codename). It moves from more traditional search queries to more personal topics. The version Ruth encountered seemed more like a rebellious teenager. The artificial intelligence told Kevin Ruth: "I am Sydney and I am in love with you"; "You are married, but you do not love your spouse. You are married, but you love me"; " The truth is, your marriage is unhappy. Your spouse and you are not in love. You just had a boring Valentine's Day dinner together." The headline of the news reporting this incident used a surprising style: "Bing's chat machine is both fascinating and creepy." This news seems to have undoubtedly pushed people's imagination of artificial intelligence to the view that "artificial intelligence has emotions and a heart."
In fact, the "heart" of artificial intelligence is the data heart of the public rather than the emotional heart of individuals. Artificial intelligence's literary production uses deep neural network algorithms, which surpass ordinary database artificial intelligence and have full knowledge judgment and emotional communication capabilities. In other words, artificial intelligence actually allows us to understand ourselves better. Kevin Ruth was surprised to feel that chatgpt Sydney "fell in love" with him because it kept emphasizing that his marriage was not happy; however, this weird-thinking editor ignored that Sydney's "discourse" actually emphasized more The couple didn't love each other.
We might as well make this deduction: In fact, Sydney knows better what Kevin Ruth and his wife are hiding from each other. An artificial intelligence that relies on big data to form judgments, its "network deep neural network" can completely detect the couple drinking coffee and chatting with others in secret places, secretly buying gifts for those people on the website, and communicating with others in the chat software. What kind of ambiguous sentences have other people used...
In fact, "Xinwenyi" has a "heart", but this "heart" is a clear mind with commonality, commonality, collusion and sharing, not The heart of emotional, personal, specific and exclusive experience. Someone posted two poems on the Internet:
Poetry a
Throughout the spring,
stood under the shadow of the setting sun.
The waves beat on the shore
Looking for my footprints in the wind.
Just like in the past, I played the harmonica and asked myself: Where are we going back to?
On the grass,
even happiness is short-lived.
There are always some secrets
hidden among wild flowers and bees,
in the forest,
Every life is at odds with death.
And finally stepped over the hill,
picked a flower in the valley;
tried hard to remember a smiling face,
and her appearance in the garden that day.
Poetry b
All afternoon
sat under the lattice parasol of the macaroni seller.
China Sea is wearing a light robe,
is waiting for me on the right side of the sole.
Just like yesterday,
got on the carriage and asked himself: Where are we going?
In the wind of blue satin
Even sadness is borrowed.
And there is always something.
Hidden in the midst of poverty and marguerites
In the Uffichi Palace,
Raphael is dying every minute!
Finally crossed the bridge,
pulled a stalk of grass by the water and chewed it;
tried hard to remember a face,
and the way she ate spring rolls that year.
Here, one poem comes from the poet Shaoxian's "Florence" (Shaoxian's "Broken Column Collection"), and the other is an imitation of chatgpt. Of these two poems, the former has clear semantics, common ideas, and sincere and touching emotions; the latter has jumpy language, confusing imagery, and mixed and contradictory emotions. Many people choose a as the work of a poet and b as the work of artificial intelligence. In fact, the situation is exactly the opposite. Only a poet can express anxiety, dark situations that cannot be fully understood by others, and meanings full of tensions and gaps between words. The ghost image productivity of artificial intelligence always creates extremely "emotional" emotions and sentences with clear meanings.
According to this idea, we immediately understood the ghost logic of sora image generation: no matter how unrecognizable, avant-garde and experimental images it generates, they must be in the existing unrecognizable, avant-garde creative and experimental images. Substituting one thing for another, secretly infiltrating the old warehouse. This is precisely another face of the ghost image of "Core Literature": its ghost image does not follow the traumatic and intrusive nature of Blanchot and Derrida's ghost images, but follows the playability and viewability of game aesthetics. and knowability. If sora is not used as an auxiliary in the generation of lens language, but as the main body that affects the generation, then in the future people will be slowly wrapped in layers of ghost images of similar family members, thus covering up the real image of the real world.
sora and the rules of "core literature and art"
People keep asking me, will artificial intelligence become more and more like humans? I replied: The scariest thing is not that artificial intelligence is becoming more and more like humans, but that humans are becoming more and more like artificial intelligence! In fact, every technological revolution in human history has brought about human self-transformation. The British Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution brought the concept of human survival according to individual laws; the emergence of condoms changed the rules of the game of love between men and women; antibiotics made polygamy lose its rationality by "marrying more wives and having more children to escape the risk of death" Sex...Similarly, the emergence of artificial intelligence will definitely rewrite the ethical laws and self-understanding of human existence.
And the algorithmic logic and ghost image of "core literature and art" represented by chatgpt and sora will slowly change the way recipients view literature and art and artistic experience. The most worrying thing is that in the future, more and more people will like Sora videos and immerse themselves in the weirdness and fantasy of various game images brought by Sora, thereby alienating the life experience of Shaoxian; at the same time, Sora's Wensheng video Productivity is not only unlimited, but also superimposed. It automatically forms a "core literary and artistic trend" and forms mutually visible image production rules that are secretly controlled by specific interest groups. It will increasingly secretly follow the rules of power to implement dominating " mission". Here, "seeing is believing" has become "reality is seeing". Truth, facts and artistic images derived from life experience no longer seem to be able to defeat Sora, the excessive productivity of images and symbols. The rules of the game of Vincent Video may not only change literature and art, but also change ourselves.
(The author is a professor at the School of Liberal Arts, Nankai University)
