[The 22nd Lam Wing Sam Literary Award] Short Story Award First Prize Lai Jiaqi: Writing about human emotions that cannot be replaced by AI

Lai Jiaqi won the first prize of the 22nd Lam Wing Sam Literary Award Short Story Award. (Photo by reporter Hu Shunxiang)

[Reporter Dong Bo-Ting/Report from Taipei] "Mom, I won the award, thank you." After Lai Jiaqi won the first prize of the Lin Rong Sam Literary Award for short stories with "The Creation of Words", he announced the good news to his mother in Vietnamese during his speech on the stage. He said that when he was a child, his mother passed away on Mother's Day and he never had the chance to say "I love you" to her. When interviewed, Lai Jiaqi said that when he received the notification of winning the award, he was having dinner at National Chengchi University. He cried on the spot and immediately called his high school classmates who watched him write this novel. When the other party heard this, he also yelled on the other end of the phone. He won the first prize in his first competition and said he was "flattered".

As a second-generation new resident, Lai Jiaqi used to write about his mother and grandmother. This time he deliberately changed the subject and gave himself a new test question. "Establishing Characters as Evidence" is about an AI trainer and his scrivener father who became speechless after a stroke. The details of the aphasia in the novel come from his experience taking care of his father who had suffered a stroke. After my mother suffered from nasopharyngeal cancer, she could only rely on gestures and typing on her mobile phone to communicate. He said that human emotions and real experiences cannot be replaced by AI.

Lai Jiaqi said that he still registers for the academic test every year, just to write Chinese composition and see what score he can get. He also wanted to challenge the composition routine. Everyone's life is obviously different, so why do we often write about grandma's death when we write about family relationships? This question also extends to his thinking about AI. If one day, AI can even imitate people’s emotions and life details, what else can people write? For example, there was a text in the work that was set to be generated by AI, but he insisted on writing it himself, trying to imagine how the machine would speak. He put his questions about writing routines into the literature prize and finally won the first prize.