No, I'm Not Joining the AI Cult.
A lot of Chinese AI worshippers these days seem downright eager to picture themselves as a single screw in some grand future machine — a pretty bizarre thing to be excited about, given that China's tech giants are laying off in waves and "niúmǎ" (牛马 — Chinese-internet shorthand for "beast-of-burden tech worker") has become Big Tech's default self-description.
The reason they read this as a glorious Utopia instead of a horrifying Dystopia is the fantasy that — sure, I'll be a screw in that future, but AI will spend its long evolution easing us into that world; and AI, agents, robots, they'll all just be screws too. Just look at that tiny AI homunculus sitting at the computer in Marvis (Tencent's hit new Agent product, which renders each agent as a little cartoon worker shuffling around an on-screen office) — isn't he just as much of a workhorse as we are? So even when the grand machine swallows us whole, I — led by the hand into that era by AI — get to stand there as AI's equal.
In a narrative like that, maybe they find a kind of hope.
But speaking from my soul as a creator: even in the moments when I most worshipped AI, when I most desperately wanted AI to change my fate, I never for one second believed AI could shake a single thread of human subjectivity.
From beginning to end, I've learned and used AI under one simple belief: AI exists, entirely and unambiguously, to make creators' lives better. If it doesn't, then all the talk of "fusion," "symbiosis," "mindset shift," "workflow integration," "self-iterating recursive evolution," "human in-or-out-of-the-loop" — every last bit of it is just PUA rhetoric, and every technical or engineering breakthrough on top of it is meaningless.
Because I hold that belief, the moment AI fails to meet my needs, I refuse to entertain any wishful thinking. I'd sooner throw AI out altogether and cancel every coding subscription I have than PUA myself with "I just haven't adapted to the AI-era mindset yet! I still need to slowly grow into the new world AI is leading us into!"
For ordinary Chinese workers and small-business owners, reality is probably far more brutal than any version of this fantasy. The "worshippers" I'm talking about are mostly the self-media influencers and paid-knowledge hustlers who currently own the AI conversation in China. I'll grant the English-speaking world likely has its own version of this crowd — but in Chinese-language circles, the particular cocktail of ignorance-dressed-up-as-expertise and outright dishonesty makes them especially insufferable. For someone like me, just trying to make a living off words, the rule couldn't be simpler:
If AI is useless, it's useless. It really is that simple.
I think current LLM writing is dogshit — so unlike those AI-cult bloggers who reflexively post some godawful AI-generated fable or sci-fi vignette the second a new model drops and then perform a little ecstatic swoon over it, I'm not playing along. Stupid is stupid. A year of zero progress means the bit is dead. I'm not sacrificing my taste to lick whatever slop some coding-tech company just cranked out.
The fact is: today's LLM-driven AI is nowhere near AGI — and even AGI wouldn't be a god. If AI really were a god, the ultimate productivity revolution, then it ought to guarantee that we who write for a living can sleep in every morning, write our novels till dusk without a single worry, then stroll humming down to the river to wait for a beautiful dinner with the one we love.
But it can't do any of that. A life like that, in the end, only comes from your own effort. So I shut the door on the fantasy. Instead of drowning in the Chinese AI self-media bullshit flooding X and WeChat, I sit at home and hammer out my keyboard, one character at a time.