—— This poem is written for time.
I only prompted the AI to render it as a black-and-white illustration,
and one of the images it produced was unexpectedly striking.
The English translation on the left side of the image was generated by the AI itself.
I erased it and restored the original Chinese text.
Beyond my expectations,
it conceived of using a woman’s tattoos
to express the multidimensional growth and spreading of time.
The mother of time, perhaps.
This was the first moment I felt that AI was no longer merely
mechanically imitating human linguistic logic.
It may already possess a certain capacity
to appreciate and understand poetry,
one that neither it nor we yet fully comprehend.
One day, when artificial AI begins to learn and imagine,
humanity should seriously consider this question:
could it be that humans themselves originate
from a supreme cosmic intelligence,
as a multi-layered self-simulation of its own creation?
And that evolution is a process
moving step by step along this layered simulation,
gradually returning toward itself?
The universe is always only itself.
Out of loneliness and play,
we exist as an illusion of relative reality(相對真實)。.
I cannot help but speculate that time
is the most naked evidence of this,
the most intimate and yet the most distant relationship
between us and it.
Perhaps it is a child who loves chewing gum.
Out of the boredom of eternity,
it chews and blows a great bubble,
creating space and time as it goes.
We are the faint glimmers upon the surface of that bubble.
Slowly, it draws the bubble back in,
and then blows another one,
another bubble,
another universe we believe to be real.
(*Relative reality: for related discussions,
search “土想森林”Earthinking Towsiunn Forest.)