By Sylvie Zhuang

Copyright scmp

Some young Chinese writers are said to be “in a state of panic” over rapid advances in artificial intelligence tools like DeepSeek, as they question whether the emerging technology is a blessing or a curse.
The debate was one of the key themes at a two-day conference held in Suzhou in late September – “Border Crossings in Speculative Fiction” – hosted by Nanjing University’s School of Frontier Sciences and its Institute of Global Humanities.
Speaking on the sidelines of the event, one author called for stronger copyright protection in China to counter the growing use of AI, while others said they found the technology helpful.
Award-winning science fiction writer Chen Qiufan said the launch of DeepSeek in January was a turning point, and since then “many writers have fallen into a state of panic”.
“Having tried it themselves, it feels as if AI has leapt suddenly to a level approaching human capability,” he said.
“The psychological shock is much stronger for young and emerging writers than for those who are already well established.”

Chen is best known for his 2013 novel Waste Tide, which won the Chinese Nebula Award, or Xingyun. Its English translation was a finalist in the 2020 Locus Award for Best First Novel.
Chinese generative AI model DeepSeek is said to rival the capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost.
Unlike Western models, DeepSeek was trained in Chinese. It uses a large language base from Chinese social media, where most emerging writers in China share their work or draw inspiration.
Its popularity has raised concern among writers, including whether they might be accused of plagiarism if they use AI in their work, and whether their intellectual property will be protected if their writing is used by tech firms to train chatbots like DeepSeek.
Chen said he had heard these concerns from many emerging writers.
They had been building well before DeepSeek was launched, especially last year after a team from Shanghai Normal University unveiled a novel that was generated by AI. The project, which was widely reported by Chinese media, prompted discussion about the value of works created by humans and the meaning of originality.
“There’s a growing fear, not only about the ethics of writing but also about one’s writing ability [in the era of AI],” Chen said.
He pointed to a long history of plagiarism accusations being levelled against Chinese writers.
“This raises a bigger question: if AI is more widely used, it could make unethical writing more covert – so how can originality be ensured?” he said. “It is harder now to distinguish AI-generated text as text is inherently more subtle compared to visuals.”
A new Chinese regulation, which took effect in September, requires all content providers to clearly label content that has been generated by AI. Most platforms had already been labelling AI-generated images and videos.

Copyright is another challenge. “In China, we lack institutional safeguards,” Chen said. “Intellectual property protection is very weak here.”
China’s copyright law was last amended in 2020 and there are currently no provisions for AI-generated work, stating whether copyright belongs to the AI developer, the user, or the creator of the original text.
Other countries are also grappling with these issues and a landmark settlement in the United States could set a precedent. Early last month, San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic agreed to pay US$1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit by authors whose works were pirated and used by the firm to train its chatbot Claude.
According to Chen, this outcome would be “unlikely” in China. “Even if writers do sue tech companies there would be no result, so in practice, there is almost no real protection,” he said.
“This creates a very unequal power structure, where writers are incredibly vulnerable. The publishing industry itself is already fragile, so writers are facing multiple psychological crises and a sense of looming uncertainty.”

Other writers say that despite the challenges of the AI age, the technology can be useful for the creative process.
That has been the experience of Hao Jingfang, who wrote Folding Beijing, for which she won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2016.
“I personally embrace the combination of creativity and AI,” Hao said.
Listing the benefits of using DeepSeek in her writing, she said it could “save time, enrich sentence details, expand writers’ imaginations, broaden writers’ knowledge, and it can help write up areas writers are not skilled in”.
Hao said her writing process involved 30 steps – from research to building profiles for characters and creating worlds – and AI could help in each of them.
“Recently, I’ve not only been able to use AI to do the setting for the story but I’m also getting more and more skilled at having AI write up many paragraphs,” she said.
“I’ve realised that [to do it well] firstly I need to upload very clear world-building and character-setting documents. Secondly, I need to upload my previous novels or paragraphs to maintain a consistent writing style,” Hao said.
“Finally, when making requests, I need to follow a detailed scene-by-scene outline to clearly explain the plot and requirements. A single prompt may be over 200 words.”
The science fiction author acknowledged that she sometimes had to completely rewrite the AI-generated paragraphs, but she said sometimes 90 per cent of them were usable.
I don’t think it will completely stifle creativity, but it might make authors lazy
Feng Yuan, science fiction writer
Feng Yuan, whose pen name is ShuangChiMu, also uses AI to help her create worlds. Feng, who won the Chinese Nebula Award for science fiction in 2023 and 2024, said she found the technology useful when she was writing about areas she was not familiar with, such as space and closed biospheres.
Feng shared an AI-generated document with the South China Morning Post as an example. She had asked ChatGPT for a report on terraforming Ceres – a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and the setting for her latest book.
Terraforming is a theoretical process to make a planet habitable for humans. The AI report sets out a conceptual framework for turning Ceres into a thriving, multi-species ecological environment, drawing on existing space research and futuristic designs. Feng said she could now refer to the document when she was writing about this world.
She believes AI will not kill off creativity. “So far, AI is generating ideas based on averages, but true human creativity stands out … so I don’t think it will completely stifle creativity, but it might make authors lazy,” Feng said.
“Authors shouldn’t become lazy in their areas of strength … my weakness lies in natural sciences, so I can afford to be a bit lazy in that regard.”
Support for this reporting was provided by the Melvin MS Goo Writing Fellowship, which is administered by the East-West Center.