When literature meets AI

Last autumn, science fiction writer Chen Qiufan sat in front of his computer and embarked on a peculiar collaboration with an AI model called DeepSeek. He would write a sentence and the AI would generate the next. However, he soon found himself doing something unexpected — whenever the AI suggested a direction, he deliberately veered the other way. He turned this tug-of-war into a short story, titled The Magic Brush.

The story follows a writer who, plagued by creative block, turns to an AI writing tool for help. But this is no fairy tale about machines helping people produce masterpieces. The writer discovers that what the machine excels at is calculating the most statistically probable combination of words — every sentence it offers is, in the purest sense, the "most reasonable" choice. Literature, however, is born in precisely the opposite place: in those unreasonable moments, in a writer's vigilance against cliché and the instinct to flee from it.

"AI is an extremely powerful engine of mediocrity," Chen said in an interview, "but a writer's job is precisely to resist mediocrity."

That statement may be the key to understanding the relationship between AI and literature.

Chen was one of the first Chinese writers to experiment with AI-assisted writing. He began trying various tools as early as 2017. When ChatGPT was first released, he, like many, was stunned by its fluency. But the relationship he eventually forged with the technology was neither rejection nor surrender. He came to see AI as a mirror — one that reveals his own creative habits, so he can then steer around them and take the harder, less traveled path.

If Chen's The Magic Brush shows how a writer can wrestle with AI, then another transformation underway reveals how AI can help literature travel further.

A beloved set of illustrated classics, A Picture Book of World Literature Masterpieces, is being reimagined as AI-powered short dramas. First published in 1988, the collection spans roughly 12,000 paintings by renowned artists, covering 97 works of world literature — from One Thousand and One Nights to Water Margin, from Hamlet to War and Peace. For nearly four decades, generations of Chinese readers have taken their first steps into world literature through these volumes.

Now, these static illustrations are being brought to life through AI. The technology extracts the narrative essence, character dynamics, and aesthetic style of the original works, then reshapes them into short dramas designed for the mobile screen. A sweeping classic that once took days to read can now reveal its soul within the span of a commute.

The same technological pulse has given form to Gu Yanwu, an AI-powered short drama released this May. Across ten episodes of two minutes each, the series — grounded in rigorous historical sources — uses AI to visually reconstruct the world of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, tracing the intellectual journey of the great Confucian scholar who famously declared, "Every man bears a share of responsibility for the fate of his nation." This is not history repackaged as entertainment. It is scholarship given wings through art.

This year marks the launch of China's first National Reading Week. In an age of breakneck AI acceleration, the call to build a "nation of readers" carries particular weight. Because the scent of books has never been measured by the volume of paper in circulation. It is measured by the lives behind every single volume — lives spent watching, feeling, and writing.

Let AI be the ferryman. Let it carry more readers to the shore of literature. And then — let them walk in on their own.

Rya Zhu, as a playwright, writer, and translator, brings narrative depth to the exploration of cultural heritage.