Latest news with #creativity
South China Morning Post
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
‘I'll keep writing': Chinese novelist Mai Jia will not be outdone by AI
At this year's Beijing International Book Fair, a forum on writers' perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) saw Chinese author Mai Jia make a gentle but firm stand. Dressed in a light beige jacket, the celebrated novelist sat alongside three other panellists as he offered an unusually personal and philosophical take on AI and human creativity. A recipient of the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize, Mai Jia is best known for his espionage fiction. His reflections touched on a deeper unease shared by writers and artists around the world: where human creativity stands in a time when machines are learning to imitate – and even threatening to outpace – human imagination. 'I've never really used AI,' the novelist said. 'But I've played with it. And I played with the intent of proving it's not worth playing with.' His remarks drew laughter, but it was evident he was serious about the mindset behind his experiment. Amid AI threat, Hong Kong artists say they must hone what makes art uniquely human 'I approached it with distrust. I hoped to mock it. And to a certain extent, I succeeded in doing that, so I never really used it.' Reports that Mai Jia had somehow contributed to the development of AI-generated fiction in his style were, in his own words, 'pure rumour'. 'I never demonstrated anything. I never helped build such a thing,' he said plainly. For the novelist, the rise of AI is not just a question about the future – it's a reckoning with the past. 'When we talk about AI, we think we're talking about the future. But that's not the wise thing to do,' he said. 'AI has a surging, even violent vitality. It's coming at us like a monster, like a giant we can't stop, and we have no idea where it's going or what it will become.' The 31st Beijing International Book Fair opened on Wednesday, displaying around 220,000 books from China and abroad. Photo: AFP He suggested that rather than speculate about the future of AI, people should examine its roots and view it as the culmination of a long 'digital revolution'. In his view, this revolution began when numbers first entered the human language roughly 5,000 years ago. 'When early writing systems emerged, numbers were a part of them. But numbers were never content to remain just a part of writing. They've always wanted to rebel.' The writer traces the first major turning point back to 1837, with the invention of Morse code – 'a great technology created by a great man,' he said – which allowed a message to be transmitted across oceans using only digits. This marked the first true success of the digital revolution for Mai Jia. But it came at a cost. 'Digital encoding brought us immense convenience. A message could travel from China to Europe or the United States [in one] morning. But it also introduced trouble,' he said. 'It brought cryptography. It dissolved language. It turned language into a puzzle, an obstacle.' British musicians protest government's AI plans with an 'almost' silent album Later came the second wave – computers, developed in the mid-20th century through the foundational work of figures like John von Neumann and Alan Turing. 'Instead of converting writing into ten digits, they reduced it to just two: zero and one,' he said. This, he argued, was a more complete digitisation than Morse code ever achieved. The benefits were vast – 'an entire library can now fit in a screen, a single phone' – but so were the downsides. 'When that screen is in your hand, yes, it holds endless text. But it also drains your time, digs into your greed, and pulls you downward,' he said. 'It disintegrates your attention. It exaggerates your desire to sink.' The third wave, the novelist believes, is AI. And it's the most transformative yet. 'For the first time, we are talking not just about reading or attention but about writing itself. Before, no one imagined that technology could replace the human mind in creating.' He said that today's AI revolution has created something new: a creative anxiety disorder. Over 1,700 exhibitors from 80 countries and regions took part in the fair, with Malaysia as this year's guest country of honour. Photo: Xinhua 'I don't know how this revolution will evolve. But here's what I do know: Even if AI defeats me, even if every word it writes is better than mine, I will still write,' he said. 'Not because I want to compete with it. But because writing is how I survive. If I don't read, if I don't write, I don't know how to live.' He ended with a quiet but firm conviction: 'If AI writes better than me, I'll write. If I write better than it – of course, I'll write.'
SBS Australia
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- SBS Australia
7/7: The London Bombings
SBS's award winning companion podcast. Join host Yumi Stynes for Seen, a new SBS podcast about cultural creatives who have risen to excellence despite a role-model vacuum.
Telegraph
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
From snail porridge to psychosis, Heston Blumenthal on the trauma of bipolar
In 2023, while at his home in France, Heston Blumenthal was sectioned. In Heston: My Life With Bipolar (BBC Two), a remarkably frank film in which the chef lays bare the workings of his mind, Blumenthal revisits this distressing event. But he doesn't just talk about it. Blumenthal plays himself in a reconstruction, acting out the moment he tried to fight off the policemen, doctor, and firemen who had been called there at his wife's request to take him to a psychiatric hospital. So this is not an ordinary documentary in which the director asks questions and the subject answers them. It is a deeply personal film made with some of the creativity that made Blumenthal famous. And it is based around a central question that preoccupies him: now that Blumenthal is on medication to damp down his manic highs – as well as saving him from the terrible lows which come with bipolar disorder – will that creativity desert him? It is an unusual focus in a programme about mental illness, but being unusual was what made Blumenthal a star in the first place. He was always a chef fizzing with ideas. Remember the bacon and egg ice cream, the snail porridge? Or the time he attempted to perfect the crispy skin on a Peking duck by using a petrol station tyre pump? In the film, he represents his 'kid in a sweet shop' mentality with a scene in which sweets rain down on his head. But by 2021, two years before his diagnosis, it was evident that something was very wrong. The film includes footage of a BBC interview in which, responding to a simple question, he launches into a mile-a-minute riff about the evolution of humanity. According to the programme, 1.3m people in the UK have bipolar disorder. It can take years to secure a diagnosis, and the care can be dangerously lacking; Blumenthal met Natalie, the mother of 22-year-old trainee paramedic Rebecca McLellan who died by suicide after failing to get the right support. He now has his condition under control, although the medication he takes has slowed his speech and he has a fragile air, no longer the swashbuckling chef. In the grip of a manic episode, Blumenthal believed he could communicate telepathically with his dog and solve the world's water crisis. His wife, Melanie Ceysson, felt compelled to have him sectioned after he began having hallucinations, believing there was a gun on the table in front of him. 'Bipolar had progressed to a point where I was a danger to myself before anyone raised the alarm,' he says now. 'Perhaps my reputation for energy and creativity made people less likely to question my manic highs.' There is no attempt to sugarcoat Blumenthal's story and the effect it has had on those around him. In perhaps the programme's most brutally honest moment, he sits down with Jack, one of his children. Jack says that dealing with their father could be horrible. 'We just wanted a relaxing conversation with our dad. You didn't want it. You didn't want to know anyone's thoughts,' Jack says. Was that entirely down to Blumenthal's illness? Top chefs are notoriously driven. But he is clearly in a better place now, and able to shine a light on the subject in a way that could be helpful to others.
Irish Times
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Heston: My Life with Bipolar: Gripping account of celebrity chef's journey from denial to diagnosis
In the UK , it is estimated that some 1.3 million people have bipolar disorder – more than have dementia. The statistics are presumably much the same in Ireland and yet the condition remains taboo and largely undiscussed. For that reason, it never occurred to celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal that he might have the disorder when he began to experience manic episodes several years ago. While he suspected he was neurodivergent, the word 'bipolar' never crossed his mind. How little he knew, he says in the gripping and gruelling Heston: My Life with Bipolar (BBC Two, Thursday 8pm) – until the episodes became severe, and in late 2023, he hallucinated that he had a gun. This was in France, where he lives with his wife, the French entrepreneur Melanie Ceysson. 'I was trying to fight my way out of it. Two people held my arms down,' he says. 'I was struggling a lot. Then I saw the doctor pull out this whacking great syringe.' Eighteen months later, Blumenthal is on a heavy regime of medication that has led to weight gain and resulted in his speech slowing down to a meditative not-quite-slur. He hasn't had any more of the extreme shifts in mood and energy that are a signature of bipolar disorder. And yet there this isn't quite a happy story with a happy ending. One of the themes of this fascinating and admirably honest film is his fear that the drugs that have stabilised his mind may have snuffed out the creativity that drove him in his early career. As foodies will know, Blumenthal was at the cutting edge of the cutting edge as proprietor of the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray (a village in Berkshire rather than the Irish seaside town, as I was disappointed to discover after many years of assuming Wicklow was at the white-hot frontline of gastronomic innovation). Snail porridge, bacon and egg ice cream – he was the master of the non sequitur menu. READ MORE Blumenthal had long suspected his brain was different. He compares the zing of inspiration to a drizzle of sweets pitter-pattering down on his head. In 2023, the downpour became a deluge, and he was overwhelmed. Looking back, it is obvious he was hurtling towards a crash. However, he had been too blinded by success to recognise the danger signs. 'I ended up becoming a hamster on a wheel. I self-medicated with cocaine. I didn't realise I was self-medicating at the time. I was absolutely self-medicating. I knew I had a busy head. I didn't know if it was more busy than other people's heads,' he says. 'I looked up if I was autistic. I didn't even think about bipolar.' In one painful scene, he is shown a TV interview he gave shortly before his breakdown. The journalist says hello, and Blumenthal, dialling in over Zoom, embarks on a 10-minute stream-of-consciousness monologue. It's as if every nerve ending in his brain is firing at once, and it's all coming straight out of his mouth. 'I want to put the inside-out back into the outside-in. I want to put the being back into the human,' he says. The interviewer smiles nervously. 'He's asked me one question,' says Blumenthal today. ''How are you? That's it.' A more self-involved celebrity would make it all about themselves. To his credit, Blumenthal moves on from his own struggles to address the failure of the British health service to meet the needs of those who are bipolar. He calls on the mother of Rebecca McLellan, a paramedic from Ipswich who died by suicide after being denied the medical care she required. In another moving scene, Blumenthal meets his son Jack, who talks about how difficult it was to be around his father. 'We'd plan it three weeks in advance, getting prepared just to see you for half an hour,' says Jack, who now runs his own restaurant. 'And there was nothing I could do to help you.' Blumenthal's face crumples, and he struggles to hold back tears. 'I'm sorry,' he says. It is one of many hugely emotive sequences in a documentary that bravely traces the chef's journey from denial to diagnosis. Its most significant achievement is that, just a few minutes in, the viewers begins to see Blumenthal not as a famous foodie in fancy spectacles – but a vulnerable individual who desperately needs support.
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Creative talent shines at Stroud School of Art end-of-year show
STROUD School of Art's end-of-year exhibition showcased an impressive array of creative talent. Held at SGS College's Stroud campus from June 9 to June 13, the event featured the best works of art from students at different levels and courses. This year, for the first time, pieces from the 14 to 16-year-old SGS Create cohort were included, alongside pieces by Level 1 -3, Access to HE, and adult part-time courses. Tom Henderson, head of Stroud School of Art, said: "We are so proud of our learners and the outstanding work they have produced. "This exhibition is a powerful reflection of their talent, commitment, and creative growth. "It highlights the incredible breadth and depth of artistic expression that thrives here at Stroud School of Art."
