Xiang Biao: Es ist nicht so, dass wir nicht sozial interagieren wollen, sondern die KI lässt die "anderen" verschwinden.

 

Not long ago, a new book by anthropologist Xiang Biao, Hello, Stranger, was published. The content of this book is a collection of a series of conversations that took place in 2023. At that time, it was at the end of the pandemic. Xiang Biao had a series of conversations with five scholars and artists from different fields, including painter Liu Xiaodong and documentary director Li Yifan, about "social alienation".

Two years have passed since that conversation, but we found that this so - called alienation has not subsided; instead, it has "escalated". The rapid development of technology, especially the popularization of AI, has led to a new shift in people's emotional dependence. Meanwhile, real offline relationships have become more fragile and distant.

At the beginning of July, we had a conversation with Professor Xiang Biao about AI, young people, and alienation. This was not a supplementary explanation of the new book but a re - observation of the current social state.

Perhaps, we are not fully prepared to embrace the AI society. But before that, we can at least learn to recognize the "human touch" in a person. Because only there can the real society begin, and trust between people can be rebuilt.

 Hello, Stranger, published by CITIC Publishing Group, is a work led by anthropologist Xiang Biao that analyzes the relationships between people in modern society.

The following is a conversation between Houlang Research Institute (hereinafter referred to as Houlang) and Xiang Biao:

AI Completely Realizes the Concept of "Self - Pity"

Houlang: Previously, people were talking about the disappearance of the "nearby". Many people would ignore those around them and communicate with people farther away on the Internet. Now we find that many people may even give up communicating with others. They prefer to chat with AI or intelligent agents and develop emotional dependence on AI. There are even some extreme cases abroad where people marry the virtual images of AI, and real interpersonal communication has become increasingly difficult. Are you worried about this trend of "only talking to AI"?

Xiang Biao: I am worried about this trend. However, we need to understand that the anxiety AI brings to people is not from AI itself. This should be understood in a broader social context. On the one hand, the emergence of AI coincides with a time of economic downturn, increasing survival pressure on people, and the spread of pessimistic and confused emotions. The appearance of AI has brought great excitement and novelty. Business tycoons, capital, and the government are all enthusiastically promoting it. It seems that AI has magical powers that can lead us out of the trough and bring a brand - new future. But on the other hand, for young individuals, AI scares them. They don't know how to face a technology that may replace their jobs, emotions, and even control their lives.

When such individual feelings are put together with the excited overall narrative, there will be a feeling of being a stranger in the historical trend. People feel that they don't understand the historical trend, and the historical trend won't care about them. They may become the ones to be eliminated by the historical trend. Against this backdrop, alienation may become more profound and widespread. The emotional dependence on AI is actually a reflection of this alienation trend.

Houlang: Then what consequences will this trend bring?

Xiang Biao: Using AI as an object to pour out emotions and seek warmth means not only the disappearance of the "nearby" but also, to some extent, the disappearance of people.

Why is AI so attractive? Why is an AI lover a perfect lover? Because it is designed according to your own needs. No matter how smoothly AI is shaped to talk to you, it cannot bring you a unique perspective based on life experience because it doesn't have an independent life experience. It can't draw on its specific experiences to analyze problems; it can only cater to your emotions. So what it provides is not real communication but just a more advanced echo wall or your shadow. Now AI completely realizes the concept of "self - pity".

As your understanding of the complexity and diversity of the world becomes increasingly blurred, the world itself seems vague and terrifying. In work and life, others won't be your shadow. You don't know how to deal with them. You feel that life is a huge danger, like an arena, rather than finding it interesting that others are different from you. You lose this ability. We can't see people anymore.

Houlang: This sounds very pessimistic.

Xiang Biao: But there is hope here. If one is completely self - pitying, why use AI to create a shadow? It shows that people still want to have a dialogue and hope to get a response.

This reveals a basic nature of human beings. The self - cognition must be achieved through the existence of others. Otherwise, there is no need to talk to AI. The current danger is that this desire is misdirected into a dialogue with a shadow. Young friends can think about why the voice that seems to come from another life is important to you.

Figuring these things out may help people take a step forward to find real others. Maybe the feedback from real others will be more powerful. Maybe it will sometimes make you choke, surprise you, or make you uncomfortable, but it will truly stimulate your connection with others and your self - reflection.

Houlang: But first, one needs to develop this awareness to pull oneself out.

Xiang Biao: Yes. There is a more practical idea, not about how to stay away from AI, but about cultivating another powerful way of interaction that makes you feel it is more attractive than AI. The reason for rebuilding the "nearby" or imagining specific strangers (before we launched the "Hello, Stranger" project, one of our ideas was to mobilize people to write about the strangers they often see around them, guessing their situations, their biggest anxieties, their expectations, and their family situations, etc.) is exactly this. Through such interventions and actions, people will find that there is another way to imagine life, interact with others, and express various feelings in their hearts. Then they won't be so dependent on AI.

Why is the momentum of AI particularly strong in Chinese society and East Asian society? The reason is not the AI technology itself but that life has already become very insubstantial. People don't have much ability or energy to interact with their surroundings and strangers. They already have this sense of loneliness and fear. Then when AI comes, it seems to solve many of their problems. They feel that they fit better with AI. So they not only feel self - pity but also feel like they've found an old friend at first sight.

Before the arrival of AI, the administrativeization of our entire education and work systems had become increasingly formalized, and our way of thinking had already been AI - like. We don't seek jumpy or lateral thinking, nor do we rely on interactions with specific individuals to meet our emotional needs. We increasingly rely on symbols, signs, and abstract rules for deduction and reflection. So we can't blame all our current dilemmas on AI. For example, self - isolation and social phobia already existed in the previous Internet era; AI has just intensified them. Since the root of the problem is not AI, the solution is not about whether to use AI but about whether we still have a life besides AI.

Still from the movie Dreams: A human chatting with AI

Houlang: This makes me think of an article we wrote three years ago about the "Female Praise Sessions" (Beijing Women's Praise Sessions: After Being Praised by Pretty Girls for 2 Hours, I'm Hooked). In a small shop in Beijing, there is a "praise session" for women every week. After entering, people will praise each other, such as complimenting one's three - dimensional facial features, nice lipstick, or good taste, and then share their stories. It's a new type of social activity, and there are actually quite a lot of such actively - created social activities. People will actively participate in them, and sometimes it even seems like they are over - exerting themselves in socializing. However, it seems that few people can enter and maintain deeper relationships in the end.

Xiang Biao: I'm very curious. If I go to those praise sessions, how will others praise me? (Laughs)

It's very valuable that people are willing to make such efforts. They still hope to meet others. I haven't participated in them. Maybe it will turn into a kind of humorous comedy show. People may praise each other very creatively and don't really care if it's a sincere compliment. Everyone will just laugh. When people come together, no matter how strange the scene or the original purpose is, as long as you don't deliberately perform or deceive with a purpose, there will generally be some interesting interactions.

It seems that the praise sessions may also increase people's sense of alienation. People come with this purpose and keep praising each other. After being praised, you feel obliged to praise back. In this way, instead of getting to know each other better, you are just maintaining the distance through your actions. The praise sessions keep the relationship at the level of mutual praise with words. At a praise session, you may not say, "I spent three hours on makeup this morning. It was so annoying," or "This dress is actually very uncomfortable. I was deceived." If you say this, the other person will find it cute. If you don't, sitting there uncomfortably in your clothes means you have to constantly mobilize your mental energy to maintain this state. You need to monitor yourself and others, put pressure on others to monitor themselves, and maintain the relationship unchanged. Alienation means deliberately maintaining a strange relationship, fearing to become familiar because you don't know how to handle it.

For example, the praise sessions can be an experiment. One day, I'll make myself look extremely ugly with makeup and see how people praise me. Here, a bit of creativity and courage are needed. I throw out this stimulus to see how others respond, and then we can open up to each other. Instead of confirming one's beauty and the ability to give praise, that would be a continuation of alienation.

"The Human Touch"

Houlang: But now people are very afraid of exposing their flaws. Not long ago, at an event, Xu Zhiyuan also mentioned that people are very afraid of making mistakes. They will repeatedly retouch photos and revise captions before posting on WeChat Moments. It seems that everyone is pursuing an extreme form of perfection. But on the other hand, as you just said, complaining about spending three hours on makeup is a kind of frankness that breaks some relationship boundaries. Exposing flaws can actually make people seem cute and likable because of the "human touch". What do you think is the underlying logic behind these two phenomena?

Xiang Biao: There are two layers of underlying logic here. One is authenticity. When you see others being so perfect, you feel pressured. You try to make yourself perfect, but you know it's not real, and you also know that others' perfection is not real either. Then the world becomes rather illusory. You don't know what is real and what is false in the world, which makes you feel very powerless.

People like to tell the truth. This is not simply a human nature. After you tell the truth, you'll keep talking more, in more detail, and more deeply, and it will become more interesting. This mobilizes different experiences, taking you from one aspect to another. You'll feel that you are very rich, and it's a process of self - cultivation and self - growth.

Telling lies means forcing yourself to serve a certain statement. You'll soon run out of energy because your experiences can't support those words. You'll feel that you are the one being negated, that you are not perfect. Only authenticity can be sustainable.

The second is the need for interaction, which is directly related to the need for authenticity. Once a person has the human touch, you'll naturally feel that this person is worth making friends with and talking to. Your little flaws will inspire me to share more, and the communication will become richer and more interesting. If everything is perfect, it's not communication but just you presenting a text and me presenting another text. That's all.

Why do we use the term "human touch"? Obviously, it is in contrast to AI, which is relatively a perfect non - human entity. Currently, AI mainly relies on large - language models, which collect as many existing languages in the world as possible. It takes the most frequently - appearing expressions as the main model. Of course, it looks very pleasing to the eye because you've seen such expressions a lot. What standard do we use to define something as perfect? It's nothing more than conforming to the least - reflective habits of the majority. It is aimed at the so - called public view of perfection but does not show individuality.

The "human touch" is an important concept that I think should be promoted.

Photo by He Yong

Houlang: To some extent, can the "human touch" be understood as a sense of relaxation? How do you think the collective manifestation of the states of relaxation and tension in the current society is related to AI?

Xiang Biao: AI can easily make people tense. I've never used AI myself. This is just my imagination, so it might be wrong. For example, when I want to write an article, the text generated by AI makes me feel that it's very difficult to surpass. The framework is perfectly clear, and the language expression is smooth... You can tell that it doesn't sound like something a human would say, but it seems so powerful that you can't come up with something better. It makes you feel suffocated, and this makes you tense.

When people are tense, they can't get along with themselves peacefully. They feel that there is something wrong with themselves and need to grit their teeth to correct themselves. You seem to be competing with AI and feel that AI reminds you of your shortcomings. You don't know how to write better than AI. This makes you doubt your own value, original characteristics, and life experiences, and then you'll be tense.

But as a thinker, what I need to do is not to be perfect but to have characteristics. So I must be very relaxed and notice where my characteristics lie. The things I say will definitely not be as perfect as those of AI, but I have a characteristic that AI can't capture because this characteristic doesn't exist in the established discourse.

In this sense, relaxation means confidence. Whether you can be relaxed or confident enough to express your characteristics is a huge task. In the future, our evaluation system, such as how a unique or personal perspective comes from experience, will become more important.

But so far, we don't pay much attention to these when writing articles. For example, school compositions, university research reports, and company reports all lack the human touch. As I just said, it's not because of the arrival of AI that there is no human touch. Before the arrival of AI, there were all kinds of stereotyped writing. We have been trained to be tools like AI. Now we've reached a