At this year’s Beijing International Book Fair, a forum on writers’ perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) saw Chinese author Mai Jia make a gentle but firm stand.
Dressed in a light beige jacket, the celebrated novelist sat alongside three other panellists as he offered an unusually personal and philosophical take on AI and human creativity.
A recipient of the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize, Mai Jia is best known for his espionage fiction. His reflections touched on a deeper unease shared by writers and artists around the world: where human creativity stands in a time when machines are learning to imitate – and even threatening to outpace – human imagination.
“I’ve never really used AI,” the novelist said. “But I’ve played with it. And I played with the intent of proving it’s not worth playing with.”
His remarks drew laughter, but it was evident he was serious about the mindset behind his experiment.
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“I approached it with distrust. I hoped to mock it. And to a certain extent, I succeeded in doing that, so I never really used it.”
Reports that Mai Jia had somehow contributed to the development of AI-generated fiction in his style were, in his own words, “pure rumour”.
“I never demonstrated anything. I never helped build such a thing,” he said plainly.
For the novelist, the rise of AI is not just a question about the future – it’s a reckoning with the past.
“When we talk about AI, we think we’re talking about the future. But that’s not the wise thing to do,” he said. “AI has a surging, even violent vitality. It’s coming at us like a monster, like a giant we can’t stop, and we have no idea where it’s going or what it will become.”
He suggested that rather than speculate about the future of AI, people should examine its roots and view it as the culmination of a long “digital revolution”.
In his view, this revolution began when numbers first entered the human language roughly 5,000 years ago. “When early writing systems emerged, numbers were a part of them. But numbers were never content to remain just a part of writing. They’ve always wanted to rebel.”
The writer traces the first major turning point back to 1837, with the invention of Morse code – “a great technology created by a great man,” he said – which allowed a message to be transmitted across oceans using only digits. This marked the first true success of the digital revolution for Mai Jia.
But it came at a cost. “Digital encoding brought us immense convenience. A message could travel from China to Europe or the United States [in one] morning. But it also introduced trouble,” he said. “It brought cryptography. It dissolved language. It turned language into a puzzle, an obstacle.”
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Later came the second wave – computers, developed in the mid-20th century through the foundational work of figures like John von Neumann and Alan Turing.
“Instead of converting writing into ten digits, they reduced it to just two: zero and one,” he said. This, he argued, was a more complete digitisation than Morse code ever achieved. The benefits were vast – “an entire library can now fit in a screen, a single phone” – but so were the downsides.
“When that screen is in your hand, yes, it holds endless text. But it also drains your time, digs into your greed, and pulls you downward,” he said. “It disintegrates your attention. It exaggerates your desire to sink.”
The third wave, the novelist believes, is AI. And it’s the most transformative yet.
“For the first time, we are talking not just about reading or attention but about writing itself. Before, no one imagined that technology could replace the human mind in creating.” He said that today’s AI revolution has created something new: a creative anxiety disorder.
“I don’t know how this revolution will evolve. But here’s what I do know: Even if AI defeats me, even if every word it writes is better than mine, I will still write,” he said. “Not because I want to compete with it. But because writing is how I survive. If I don’t read, if I don’t write, I don’t know how to live.”
He ended with a quiet but firm conviction: “If AI writes better than me, I’ll write. If I write better than it – of course, I’ll write.”
