Artificial Intelligence; Real Art

JENNIFER CONRAD: Tell me about the script for Surplus Intelligence. Did it come directly from GPT-3?

MIAO YING: It’s almost like a science fiction story set in the past, but it’s about the technology of the future. I didn’t alter what the AI wrote. GPT-3 generated a short story at first. Computer science graduate students Michael Barron and Benjamin Hwang worked with me to break it down into parts and fed it back to GPT-3 to develop more from it, which later became the chapters in the film, and we selected what made the most sense from each variation. Once we had the script, I made the visuals. You can’t write a really long, comprehensive text with GPT-3, but I feel like right now we're in a sweet spot. What it writes is interesting enough that it’s not too stupid, but it’s still a little bit off. But I think GPT-3 is developing really fast. When I started working with GPT-3’s predecessor GPT-2 in 2019, it couldn’t write a coherent story. Just a year or two later, it’s much more advanced. A lot of product reviews I believe are written by AI. It’s really good bullshitting.

In the film, AI “shepherds” nudge the residents of Walden XII toward good behavior. The cockroach protagonist mines bitcoin to save her AI, through a process similar to the old Catholic practice of buying indulgences to save a soul from purgatory. What did you think of the script GPT-3 wrote?

With the film, I like how you sit there and you’re like, oh, what am I watching? Why is the power stone described as looking like a burrito? I like the feeling of, you’re getting serious and then something sets you off so you’re like, is this serious or a joke?

I wanted to develop a romantic story. It’s a form of Stockholm syndrome: You’re not aware of how much you’re controlled by the algorithm. You’re so drawn in that when the algorithm does something really bad, you try to save it. I love that the part about bitcoin was written by GPT-3, I think because it was trending last year. I was really, really surprised.

You trained GPT-3 using translated Chinese online novels, prayer books, American and Chinese ideological texts, and Walden Two, a 1948 utopian novel by behavior psychologist B. F. Skinner. What did GPT-3 make of your sources?

The online novels are basically S&M novels, similar to Fifty Shades of Grey. In the Chinese version, instead of falling in love with a CEO, the characters mostly fall in love with people who have power, like the third generation of red aristocrats. The writing is so bad, and they have so many chapters. I think all the romantic parts in the script come from that and the repetitiveness of the language. I also fed it American and Chinese ideologies. So it’s creating a kind of fantasyland. Sometimes you think it’s talking about America and sometimes you think it’s talking about China.

I’m really into Skinner’s idea of behavioral theory. His novel Walden Two implies that if you just reinforce positive behavior, then you might not need to punish people. You will have an organic system in which people only do positive things. This film is almost like a simulation, like if Walden Two ran for many, many versions. That’s why the village is called Walden XII.

Why make the villagers cockroaches?

I feel like we’re just data. It’s like cockroaches: There’s so many of us and it’s really easy to be replaced.

In the film, AI “shepherds” enforce something like a social credit system among the population. The AIs have different personalities: a goth/punk young migrant worker who’s part of the shamate (“smart”) subculture, a supernationalistic Wolf Warrior, and the intellectual who the cockroach tries to save. How did you come up with them?

I wanted them to be different classes: superheroes, workers who are being replaced by AI, outsourced farmers, and the privileged class, etc. They were actually inspired by both the American and Chinese dreams, one emphasizing social mobility, the other making China great again. In a dystopian future, much worse than a “filter bubble,” Big Data can grant the government much more power so it can have influence on every daily activity, and you don’t even feel like you’re being watched. And then on the other hand, in the fantasy land of Walden XII, there are dumb AIs inspired by the sort of retired middle-aged woman called a “Chaoyang da ma” who does square dancing. She has a notebook — it’s completely analog — and she writes down what her neighbors do. I felt really amazed by this super high-tech algorithm alongside this raw spying on your neighbor. What is more powerful?

You’ve said that you and your peers in China saw about 100 years of development compressed into a decade or two. How do you think it affects your generation of artists?

I think it’s a mixed bag. My elementary school, middle school, and high school — they’re all gone. It’s like you’ve spent your whole life in a city, but there are no memories if you go back. I guess most people feel less secure, like nothing is rooted, especially in Shanghai where everything has gotten so expensive and a lot of the traditions are gone. But I also feel like for artists it’s almost a privilege, because this kind of growth can only happen in China.

You went to art school at the renowned China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where you studied under Zhang Peili, a pioneering Chinese artist who began experimenting with video art in the late 1980s. I’ve noticed that China has produced a lot of really excellent artists working in digital and new media. Why do you think that is?

I think it’s interesting that Chinese people more easily adapt to technology. In the States, if you’re retired, you don’t have to be on social media. In China, you don’t have a choice. Everyone is using WeChat. If you want to buy something at the grocery store for 50 cents or a dollar, no one will take cash and people will be mad if you try to use it. My mom was teaching me how to use a digital wallet. I felt like I was the parent and she was the teenager!

You have relatives who were in Shanghai during the recent COVID lockdowns. One thing that was striking was how people came together to help each other. It reminded me of the collectivism I saw in Chengdu after the earthquake in 2008.

Everything was organized on WeChat. The young people would order food for the whole building. I think there is a sense of collectivism in China, and that’s what I’m always trying to express in my work. You get bound to what you know.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A version of this story was originally published by WIRED.