In the era of AIGC, a large number of liberal arts jobs, such as text writers, painters, and planners, are at risk of being replaced by AI. At the same time, the "intelligent emergence" of generative AI (meaning that what humans do not teach AI, AI can learn by itself) also makes people anxious about how to manage AI.

The True Story Room spoke with Professor Yu Guoming, director of the Academic Committee of the School of Journalism and Communication at Beijing Normal University, and asked him to share the way forward for liberal arts students (especially journalism or content people) and the new way of life for humans in the future under the AI wave.

Yu Guoming's core ideas are as follows:

1. In the AIGC era, understanding technology and society, and understanding market and design principles is a very important direction for future students of New Communication and even liberal arts students to enhance their social and market values. Liberal arts students and science students are the "two wings of the bird" of social development, and the key to the future is to achieve "human-machine synergy and integration".

2. The most important function of generative AI is "human enhancement", which greatly reduces the difference between the so-called elite and the general layman. This human augmentation eliminates the gap caused by human talent and will structure the interaction and corresponding patterns of future society.

3, AIGC era, the machine is increasingly thinking like a human is not terrible, what is terrible is that people will think like a machine. The averaging of algorithm breaks the boundary and the wall of intelligence between people, but it also forms the disdain, devaluation and domestication of individual value of people. How people go about forming their own individual places of existence is the primary question. ‍

The following is a transcript of the conversation:

Q1: After the emergence of ChatGPT, media people have a stronger sense of crisis and worry that they are no longer useful. What do you think?

A1: Actually, I think the news media is an indispensable role in the life of a society. Without this role, there will be major problems in the operation system and decision-making system of the whole society.

But the value of this role does not lie in itself, but in the position given to it by society. If this role value is lost, the normal functioning hierarchy of society will collapse, and this collapse will cost society a heavy price.

This is also a kind of society to maintain the value of the role of the media.

On the other hand, the profession of media itself is to look at society from the perspective of communication, media and news, the role of media, the value of media, the logic of media and the basis of the view of treating something presented by media, which is the profession and the base of media to look at the world and evaluate the world.

The value of the role of the media is the value in the life of society, not its self-proclaimed.

Q2: In the era of AIGC, how can liberal arts students (such as journalism and cultural communication majors) improve their career attractiveness/how can they get well-paying jobs?

A2: We once did a study.

Among the graduates who entered the Internet companies after graduating from the first-tier universities in China, those who majored in new communication, their monthly salary was about 5,000-8,000 yuan, and if they worked normally, their salary could rise to 10,000-12,000 yuan after one year; however, the monthly salary of computer science graduates could reach from 30,000 yuan, and after one year, they were able to increase about 15% according to the average salary, and their salary could rise to about 500,000 yuan/year after five years This is accompanied by the promotion of rank.

In such a situation, we have made an ambitious wish: to make the salary of new communication graduates as good as that of computer science graduates.

Traditional journalism and communication education graduates, in Internet companies, generally can only work in publicity, planning or brand communication related work, Internet companies such as Ali, Tencent, Baidu, bytes, these head companies are more concerned about social communication level, the salary will be higher, but most companies will pay more attention to the technical level, the salary for social communication level will be lower.

Therefore, we have made a big change in the curriculum. Students need to be motivated by Internet technology, they need to know what the technology does, how to apply it to the market, and how to productize it.

In 2019, we opened a new major called "Internet Product Manager" at Beihang University to teach students how to use market insights, user insights and their own understanding of technology to design products or services for the market. The talents of these will have a starting salary of more than 30,000 RMB for technical positions when they arrive at Internet companies.

Knowing technology and society, knowing market and design principles, this is a very important direction for future new communication students and even liberal arts students to enhance their social and market values.

Q3: Why are there so many voices in the society worrying about their jobs being replaced by AI?

A3: Why do people react more heavily to the emergence of generative AI this time, and here we have to ask a rhetorical question: Do ordinary workers and farmers react greatly to this matter?

In fact, they have little reaction, what to do or continue to do, instead, the brain workers (elite class) who used to consider themselves as belonging to the upper middle class in social life feel the threat, which is their natural muscle reaction to the new technology they do not understand.

During the first few industrial revolutions, the revolution of industrialization at that time was more reflected in the manual labor of people, and a large number of manual jobs such as shouldering and carrying, forest splitting and logging were replaced by machines, so the general labor public was full of hatred for machines and went to smash them.

But in the end, it is still not a weapon, one is unable to change the trend of historical development, and the second is that manual laborers have very little voice in the management of society, and naturally the influence will not be too great.

And this time, AI can replace most of the human labor, such as mechanical, repetitive, computational, collection, whatever programmed to be able to carry out, described by algorithms, some work that requires data support will be replaced by AI.

Such work happens to be performed by most brain workers, so they feel panic. It is also because brain workers have many avenues of vocalization that their voices can be heard and can become a system of scale.

But the development of technology and society still won't stop because of these voices, and for this part of the workforce, the current priority is actually to learn how to use AI to improve their own efficiency and add leverage for themselves.

Q4: What should be the relationship between media people, creators and technologies like AIGC? Integration or game?

A4: If we use the game to understand our relationship with technology, we are going in the wrong direction.

In the period of mass communication, everyone is instilled with the viewpoint of competition. Take radio and TV for example, if you choose one channel, you cannot watch another channel at the same time, and the same goes for newspapers, most people will not choose two daily newspapers of the same type, which is a competitive and exclusive type of competition.

Today is actually the era of digital civilization, which is different from industrial civilization, which is a fission development, while digital civilization is a fusion development.

Why do we need the Internet? It is to form new functions and new values by connecting and reconnecting. In the Internet to create their own value, not in the competition to obtain, to a greater extent, in the cooperation, integration, mutual matching to form and build up.

We always say that behind the technology or the people who master the technology, the so-called game with technology is actually the traditional rules, rights and interests of the recipients, that is, these people are playing with the people who master the technology, so in the end is the game between people, not between people and technology.

Q5: What impact will generative AI have on the field of news communication?

A5：From the perspective of the expression of communication itself, a set of laws, ideas, rules, requirements and roles formed during the traditional mass communication period, which we often call "journalistic professionalism".

However, in the process of the development of the Internet, as more and more people are able to make communication decisions, the right to communicate and the right to speak out has logically been given to everyone, as long as they are willing to speak out.

The author of a book called "The Death of the Editor-in-Chief" (by Chen Xu, former executive editor of Newsweek Chinese magazine and political and economic columnist) uses the editor-in-chief to replace the role of gatekeeper played by the media in the past, which has now been broken by technology, allowing almost everyone to communicate and share with society without the specific gatekeeper of the editor-in-chief. Therefore, the author believes that such a central role of the traditional media is gradually being dismantled and dispersed.

The "gatekeeper" is actually a set of rules established during the mass media period. In the Internet communication period, with the rise of social media, the popularity of social platforms and short video technology has broken through the elite hegemony of discourse expression and greatly reduced the "threshold" of content production and social expression. This has lowered the "threshold" for content production and social expression, making the era of "everyone can be a communicator" a reality.

Social media has given everyone equal rights to speak, at least formally, so that everyone can deliver a message to society without being screened by others.

However, changes in production methods such as today's intelligent media and AIGC have given communication a completely different look.

Generative AI has broken through the difference in the ability of different people to use and integrate resources, allowing for greater improvement in the ability of people to mobilize resources and express themselves. At least theoretically, everyone can use a semantic expression and resource mobilization ability above the social average to produce social content and dialogue, which is another major boundary breakthrough and great empowerment for the "disadvantaged".

Q6: What is the most important function of generative AI in the field of communication?

A6: One of the most important functions of generative AI, I would describe it as human enhancement.

What do I mean by human enhancement? It means that in the past, due to the difference in talent and effort, the public was divided into the general public and the elite class. In the past, it was the elite who had the power of speech and voice channels, but what kind of state is it now?

Now, thanks to the empowerment of generative AI, for example, in terms of translation ability, the results you get from applications like ChatGPT are not worse than those translated by foreign language professionals, and sometimes even better.

In this case, even if I am a foreign language illiterate, I can still translate the text with ChatGPT, and then I can communicate with anyone in the world with different native languages without any hindrance.

This greatly reduces the professional distance between professionals and the general public. Although this distance may not be completely eliminated and there may still be gaps in some aspects, at least in terms of fundamentals, they are close to the point of negligibility.

This human enhancement dissolves the gap created between the human talent and the difference, which is particularly important and will structure the interaction and the corresponding pattern of the future society.

Q7: What are the differences between domestic companies and overseas companies in the direction of developing generative AI?

A7: The main reason why Open AI was able to make ChatGPT is that they declared themselves as a public interest input project without much profit pursuit and no profit pressure on the scientists and engineers in the project, so they can focus on solving the key problems in technology. On top of that, they then proceed to commercial realization.

In contrast, when domestic companies do research and development in AI, they will pay more attention to value realization and output. Before Baidu Wenxin Yiyin was released, hundreds of companies had already announced cooperation and lined up to sign up, which has revealed here that Baidu has clear awareness and requirements for capital realization and value output when it comes to R&D.

So we will see that the domestic large model application in dealing with the fundamentals of the problem seems weak, but instead in the professional field ability is extremely strong, but the general public rarely experience the aspect of professional ability, can only see them in the general problem, the answer seems very weak.

Q8: Is there a big difference in the current level of generative AI products/big models at home and abroad?

A8: In fact ChatGPT made by Open AI is not a major technical breakthrough in terms of so-called AI deep learning or development logic, it just matches together such as big models, pre-training, feeding of massive information, etc. By achieving a critical mass of these aspects, it produces a chemical change rather than just a physical level of superposition.

In the past, we have studied more discriminative AI represented by "recognition-analysis", but now we have explored and made some achievements in generative AI represented by "synthesis-reconstruction". We are now exploring and making some achievements in generative AI such as "synthesis-reconstruction".

Just like carbon, which can take the form of coal or diamond, the shift from discriminative to generative AI is a phase change (the process of transforming matter from one phase to another, often used to describe the transformation of matter between solid, liquid, and gaseous states) rather than a vertical breakthrough in the technology itself.

We also have a lot of domestic talents and experts in AI, although there is a certain obstacle in chip computing power, but what others can do with 20 chips, we can also do with 50, only the cost will be higher, and will not become a bottleneck in research and development.

However, in terms of data volume, as many of our platforms are not open and interoperable data, they cannot use each other's text materials, while a large number of overseas academic databases and repositories are open, so the English corpus will be bigger than the Chinese corpus.

This will lead to a result that the answers obtained by searching in English are of higher quality than those obtained by searching in Chinese, and the same is true for both overseas and domestic applications.

Q9: What kind of new changes will AIGC bring to the future social life?

A9: Marx outlined the future society as "the association of free men" more than 100 years ago.

In other words, the future society will be organized in such a way that the connection between people is not under the control of an organizational system, but as a subject, it will gather with people on the basis of equality, and disperse if it does not.

The Internet community has a new term called "DAO" (Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a new way of human organizational collaboration), this kind of social autonomy is a bit like the circle, but there is still a gap between the circle and DAO.

Each member of the circle does not have the right to confirm the data, value and content they create, which all belong to the platform.

So there are web 1.0, web 2.0, web 3.0 gradual upgrade, web 1.0 is what you can see, you can receive, web 2.0 is what you can use, web 3.0 is what you can use and own. After web 3.0 is confirmed, the society will become the basic organization state of the future society like DAO.

In such a context, in fact, we do not need to be dependent on anything, but to accomplish a specific function, to achieve a specific value, with different people to do different combinations of this functionality, value.

This is the style of the future society, so in such a society, what we need is not competition, but cooperation and integration of design and creativity.

In the era of AIGC, a large number of liberal arts jobs, such as text writers, painters, and planners, are at risk of being replaced by AI. At the same time, the "intelligent emergence" of generative AI (meaning that what humans do not teach AI, AI can learn by itself) also makes people anxious about how to manage AI.

The True Story Room spoke with Professor Yu Guoming, director of the Academic Committee of the School of Journalism and Communication at Beijing Normal University, and asked him to share the way forward for liberal arts students (especially journalism or content people) and the new way of life for humans in the future under the AI wave.

Yu Guoming's core ideas are as follows:

1. In the AIGC era, understanding technology and society, and understanding market and design principles is a very important direction for future students of New Communication and even liberal arts students to enhance their social and market values. Liberal arts students and science students are the "two wings of the bird" of social development, and the key to the future is to achieve "human-machine synergy and integration".

2. The most important function of generative AI is "human enhancement", which greatly reduces the difference between the so-called elite and the general layman. This human augmentation eliminates the gap caused by human talent and will structure the interaction and corresponding patterns of future society.

3, AIGC era, the machine is increasingly thinking like a human is not terrible, what is terrible is that people will think like a machine. The averaging of algorithm breaks the boundary and the wall of intelligence between people, but it also forms the disdain, devaluation and domestication of individual value of people. How people go about forming their own individual places of existence is the primary question. ‍

The following is a transcript of the conversation:

Q1: After the emergence of ChatGPT, media people have a stronger sense of crisis and worry that they are no longer useful. What do you think?

A1: Actually, I think the news media is an indispensable role in the life of a society. Without this role, there will be major problems in the operation system and decision-making system of the whole society.

But the value of this role does not lie in itself, but in the position given to it by society. If this role value is lost, the normal functioning hierarchy of society will collapse, and this collapse will cost society a heavy price.

This is also a kind of society to maintain the value of the role of the media.

On the other hand, the profession of media itself is to look at society from the perspective of communication, media and news, the role of media, the value of media, the logic of media and the basis of the view of treating something presented by media, which is the profession and the base of media to look at the world and evaluate the world.

The value of the role of the media is the value in the life of society, not its self-proclaimed.

Q2: In the era of AIGC, how can liberal arts students (such as journalism and cultural communication majors) improve their career attractiveness/how can they get well-paying jobs?

A2: We once did a study.

Among the graduates who entered the Internet companies after graduating from the first-tier universities in China, those who majored in new communication, their monthly salary was about 5,000-8,000 yuan, and if they worked normally, their salary could rise to 10,000-12,000 yuan after one year; however, the monthly salary of computer science graduates could reach from 30,000 yuan, and after one year, they were able to increase about 15% according to the average salary, and their salary could rise to about 500,000 yuan/year after five years This is accompanied by the promotion of rank.

In such a situation, we have made an ambitious wish: to make the salary of new communication graduates as good as that of computer science graduates.

Traditional journalism and communication education graduates, in Internet companies, generally can only work in publicity, planning or brand communication related work, Internet companies such as Ali, Tencent, Baidu, bytes, these head companies are more concerned about social communication level, the salary will be higher, but most companies will pay more attention to the technical level, the salary for social communication level will be lower.

Therefore, we have made a big change in the curriculum. Students need to be motivated by Internet technology, they need to know what the technology does, how to apply it to the market, and how to productize it.

In 2019, we opened a new major called "Internet Product Manager" at Beihang University to teach students how to use market insights, user insights and their own understanding of technology to design products or services for the market. The talents of these will have a starting salary of more than 30,000 RMB for technical positions when they arrive at Internet companies.

Knowing technology and society, knowing market and design principles, this is a very important direction for future new communication students and even liberal arts students to enhance their social and market values.

Q3: Why are there so many voices in the society worrying about their jobs being replaced by AI?

A3: Why do people react more heavily to the emergence of generative AI this time, and here we have to ask a rhetorical question: Do ordinary workers and farmers react greatly to this matter?

In fact, they have little reaction, what to do or continue to do, instead, the brain workers (elite class) who used to consider themselves as belonging to the upper middle class in social life feel the threat, which is their natural muscle reaction to the new technology they do not understand.

During the first few industrial revolutions, the revolution of industrialization at that time was more reflected in the manual labor of people, and a large number of manual jobs such as shouldering and carrying, forest splitting and logging were replaced by machines, so the general labor public was full of hatred for machines and went to smash them.

But in the end, it is still not a weapon, one is unable to change the trend of historical development, and the second is that manual laborers have very little voice in the management of society, and naturally the influence will not be too great.

And this time, AI can replace most of the human labor, such as mechanical, repetitive, computational, collection, whatever programmed to be able to carry out, described by algorithms, some work that requires data support will be replaced by AI.

Such work happens to be performed by most brain workers, so they feel panic. It is also because brain workers have many avenues of vocalization that their voices can be heard and can become a system of scale.

But the development of technology and society still won't stop because of these voices, and for this part of the workforce, the current priority is actually to learn how to use AI to improve their own efficiency and add leverage for themselves.

Q4: What should be the relationship between media people, creators and technologies like AIGC? Integration or game?

A4: If we use the game to understand our relationship with technology, we are going in the wrong direction.

In the period of mass communication, everyone is instilled with the viewpoint of competition. Take radio and TV for example, if you choose one channel, you cannot watch another channel at the same time, and the same goes for newspapers, most people will not choose two daily newspapers of the same type, which is a competitive and exclusive type of competition.

Today is actually the era of digital civilization, which is different from industrial civilization, which is a fission development, while digital civilization is a fusion development.

Why do we need the Internet? It is to form new functions and new values by connecting and reconnecting. In the Internet to create their own value, not in the competition to obtain, to a greater extent, in the cooperation, integration, mutual matching to form and build up.

We always say that behind the technology or the people who master the technology, the so-called game with technology is actually the traditional rules, rights and interests of the recipients, that is, these people are playing with the people who master the technology, so in the end is the game between people, not between people and technology.

Q5: What impact will generative AI have on the field of news communication?

A5：From the perspective of the expression of communication itself, a set of laws, ideas, rules, requirements and roles formed during the traditional mass communication period, which we often call "journalistic professionalism".

However, in the process of the development of the Internet, as more and more people are able to make communication decisions, the right to communicate and the right to speak out has logically been given to everyone, as long as they are willing to speak out.

The author of a book called "The Death of the Editor-in-Chief" (by Chen Xu, former executive editor of Newsweek Chinese magazine and political and economic columnist) uses the editor-in-chief to replace the role of gatekeeper played by the media in the past, which has now been broken by technology, allowing almost everyone to communicate and share with society without the specific gatekeeper of the editor-in-chief. Therefore, the author believes that such a central role of the traditional media is gradually being dismantled and dispersed.

The "gatekeeper" is actually a set of rules established during the mass media period. In the Internet communication period, with the rise of social media, the popularity of social platforms and short video technology has broken through the elite hegemony of discourse expression and greatly reduced the "threshold" of content production and social expression. This has lowered the "threshold" for content production and social expression, making the era of "everyone can be a communicator" a reality.

Social media has given everyone equal rights to speak, at least formally, so that everyone can deliver a message to society without being screened by others.

However, changes in production methods such as today's intelligent media and AIGC have given communication a completely different look.

Generative AI has broken through the difference in the ability of different people to use and integrate resources, allowing for greater improvement in the ability of people to mobilize resources and express themselves. At least theoretically, everyone can use a semantic expression and resource mobilization ability above the social average to produce social content and dialogue, which is another major boundary breakthrough and great empowerment for the "disadvantaged".

Q6: What is the most important function of generative AI in the field of communication?

A6: One of the most important functions of generative AI, I would describe it as human enhancement.

What do I mean by human enhancement? It means that in the past, due to the difference in talent and effort, the public was divided into the general public and the elite class. In the past, it was the elite who had the power of speech and voice channels, but what kind of state is it now?

Now, thanks to the empowerment of generative AI, for example, in terms of translation ability, the results you get from applications like ChatGPT are not worse than those translated by foreign language professionals, and sometimes even better.

In this case, even if I am a foreign language illiterate, I can still translate the text with ChatGPT, and then I can communicate with anyone in the world with different native languages without any hindrance.

This greatly reduces the professional distance between professionals and the general public. Although this distance may not be completely eliminated and there may still be gaps in some aspects, at least in terms of fundamentals, they are close to the point of negligibility.

This human enhancement dissolves the gap created between the human talent and the difference, which is particularly important and will structure the interaction and the corresponding pattern of the future society.

Q7: What are the differences between domestic companies and overseas companies in the direction of developing generative AI?

A7: The main reason why Open AI was able to make ChatGPT is that they declared themselves as a public interest input project without much profit pursuit and no profit pressure on the scientists and engineers in the project, so they can focus on solving the key problems in technology. On top of that, they then proceed to commercial realization.

In contrast, when domestic companies do research and development in AI, they will pay more attention to value realization and output. Before Baidu Wenxin Yiyin was released, hundreds of companies had already announced cooperation and lined up to sign up, which has revealed here that Baidu has clear awareness and requirements for capital realization and value output when it comes to R&D.

So we will see that the domestic large model application in dealing with the fundamentals of the problem seems weak, but instead in the professional field ability is extremely strong, but the general public rarely experience the aspect of professional ability, can only see them in the general problem, the answer seems very weak.

Q8: Is there a big difference in the current level of generative AI products/big models at home and abroad?

A8: In fact ChatGPT made by Open AI is not a major technical breakthrough in terms of so-called AI deep learning or development logic, it just matches together such as big models, pre-training, feeding of massive information, etc. By achieving a critical mass of these aspects, it produces a chemical change rather than just a physical level of superposition.

In the past, we have studied more discriminative AI represented by "recognition-analysis", but now we have explored and made some achievements in generative AI represented by "synthesis-reconstruction". We are now exploring and making some achievements in generative AI such as "synthesis-reconstruction".

Just like carbon, which can take the form of coal or diamond, the shift from discriminative to generative AI is a phase change (the process of transforming matter from one phase to another, often used to describe the transformation of matter between solid, liquid, and gaseous states) rather than a vertical breakthrough in the technology itself.

We also have a lot of domestic talents and experts in AI, although there is a certain obstacle in chip computing power, but what others can do with 20 chips, we can also do with 50, only the cost will be higher, and will not become a bottleneck in research and development.

However, in terms of data volume, as many of our platforms are not open and interoperable data, they cannot use each other's text materials, while a large number of overseas academic databases and repositories are open, so the English corpus will be bigger than the Chinese corpus.

This will lead to a result that the answers obtained by searching in English are of higher quality than those obtained by searching in Chinese, and the same is true for both overseas and domestic applications.

Q9: What kind of new changes will AIGC bring to the future social life?

A9: Marx outlined the future society as "the association of free men" more than 100 years ago.

In other words, the future society will be organized in such a way that the connection between people is not under the control of an organizational system, but as a subject, it will gather with people on the basis of equality, and disperse if it does not.

The Internet community has a new term called "DAO" (Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a new way of human organizational collaboration), this kind of social autonomy is a bit like the circle, but there is still a gap between the circle and DAO.

Each member of the circle does not have the right to confirm the data, value and content they create, which all belong to the platform.

So there are web 1.0, web 2.0, web 3.0 gradual upgrade, web 1.0 is what you can see, you can receive, web 2.0 is what you can use, web 3.0 is what you can use and own. After web 3.0 is confirmed, the society will become the basic organization state of the future society like DAO.

In such a context, in fact, we do not need to be dependent on anything, but to accomplish a specific function, to achieve a specific value, with different people to do different combinations of this functionality, value.

This is the style of the future society, so in such a society, what we need is not competition, but cooperation and integration of design and creativity.