Exploring What Makes Human Beings Truly Irreplaceable
Lu Chuan
Text by Wen Lihong
Edited by Zhang Yuxin
In September, director Lu Chuan let AI take full control of one of his computers. He removed all sensitive and confidential information from the device, then trained the AI to use the editing software, 3D production software and post-production tools installed on that computer. He planned to run an experiment on this device, letting the AI start with a one-minute short film and attempt independent creation.
According to Lu Chuan’s definition, production and creation are two distinct things.
AI can do production extremely well, even beyond most people’s imagination. “Once AI gets involved, the result can basically reach 80 points out of 100. Because it has absorbed — or even stolen — the spark of humanity, and learned almost all the excellent, extraordinary works throughout human history.”
But creation is different. Creation is driven by desire. “Up to now, there is no scientific evidence proving that AI has any desire. It has no fear, no fear of death, no desire for life, no yearning for freedom, and no love.” Lu Chuan said, then fell into deep thought on his own. “The essence of creation is imperfection, it comes from personality flaws. You must have some flaws in your spirit, some black holes in your soul, and some kind of pain in your emotions. Only when a person has experienced despair can they utter a powerful cry.”
The question of whether AI can produce films no longer needs to be questioned today, as it is entirely within the boundary of computing power and algorithm capabilities. This director, who has made iconic domestic films including *Kekexili: Mountain Patrol* and *City of Life and Death*, let AI try independent creation, essentially wanting to figure out whether AI can generate the choices and expressions that belong to true creation without desire, fear, love and yearning for freedom. For him, this is still an ongoing experiment, not a conclusion.
Lu Chuan not only uses AI tools, but also develops AI tools. In the past six months, he has written three AI products on his own, covering different links of film and television production respectively.
The first one is called “Love Letter”, an AI script writing tool. Lu Chuan built this application with 10,000 lines of code within 57 days. The second one is called “On Camera”, an AI film workflow. The last one, co-developed with the company’s technical staff, is a small model called “Building Blocks”. They used their own dataset for post-training, and produced more than a dozen mature demo clips based on open-source models.
On September 22, 2025, Lu Chuan released an AI-produced AIGC short film *History · Live Scene* at the 2026 Alibaba Cloud Apsara Conference. The production process of this film is a typical example of AI accelerating film and television production: it restored the Ming Dynasty Beijing city, imperial palace and large-scale explosion scenes, saving months of time and tens of millions of RMB of investment required by traditional production methods.
△ Lu Chuan (first from right) at the 2026 Alibaba Cloud Apsara Conference site
However, he has not publicly released those serious film demo clips to date. This is a deliberate choice, as he has not yet figured out how AI should be used and what role it should play in the film and television industry system that has accompanied him since he was a child. “I’m very torn,” Lu Chuan said.
Lu Chuan is willing to embrace technological changes in the industry, but he also believes that AI should not make people in the film and television industry lose their jobs. “The film and television industry is actually a livelihood industry. Many people make a living from it,” he said. “AI is like a group of barbarians rushing in and saying ‘Stop eating, put down your bowls and stop working’. I think this is immoral, and it is not what science should do.”
Before the Apsara Conference, we talked with Lu Chuan. We wanted to know why a director who is using AI to promote the preparation of five films at the same time still writes code by himself, what he wants to figure out, and why he keeps saying “I’m very torn” after he personally uses AI to get involved in creation and sees initial positive results.
The following is the conversation between *Intelligent Emergence* and Lu Chuan, slightly edited.
Make a Pair of “Crutches” for Myself with AI
Intelligent Emergence: You developed the “Love Letter” writing software. What was your original idea at that time?
Lu Chuan: I did the math, since I entered the industry, excluding practice works, I have written roughly millions of words. This year, I wrote two film scripts from scratch, and the number of discarded draft words has reached 200,000. The year before last, I wrote the 14-episode script *Live to Survive*, which was nearly 200,000 words in total.
Writing hundreds of thousands of words every year is my normal state. It’s very tiring. I remember a famous writer once said that writing does not create suffering, because writing itself is a kind of suffering. Stephen King quoted this sentence in his novel.
Later I thought, I would make a writing software for myself, as a gift for my first half of life. I want to see if it can accompany me, communicate with me and give me a hand when I write scripts, just like a pair of crutches, or a writing companion.
Intelligent Emergence: So what is the core positioning of “Love Letter”?
Lu Chuan: It is a script writing tool. You can use it to write, or let it provide review suggestions during the script creation process, assisting creation from the perspective of a “script doctor”. It performs better as a script doctor than as a script writer. Now I have basically built a framework in “Love Letter” to cover all the pain points I encountered in writing, or the feeling that I badly need someone to talk to when I am very tired and helpless, and let AI handle these demands.
Originally its function was only to assist script writing, then I added the function of writing novels, and two days ago I added a function of writing compositions. Because my son is a primary school student now, and he finds writing compositions very painful. I’m thinking about how to stimulate him to understand the rules of writing.
In terms of functions, you can tell a story, and then let the tool help you improve it. If you want to turn the story into a series, it offers many options: long series, medium-length series, short series, or you can turn it into a film script. During the writing process, AI can communicate with you continuously, and you can ask it to comment, review and support your writing nonstop.
Intelligent Emergence: Why did you name it “Love Letter”?
Lu Chuan: When I was in college, I often wrote love letters for my friends. As a “love letter ghostwriter”, I had an extremely high success rate. Looking back now, I was actually a “physical Agent” for my friends at that time. So when I finished developing the software and needed to name it, I thought of that experience, and suddenly I thought it could be called “Love Letter”.
Intelligent Emergence: Have you used other AI writing tools before this?
Lu Chuan: Since two years ago, I have been chatting with ChatGPT and Grok during my writing process. They are actually quite powerful.
It is impossible to ask it to generate a complete script from scratch, it will produce very low-quality scripts with simple and ridiculous plots. But when I paste a finished paragraph I wrote and ask it to give comments and suggestions, its intelligence level will rise to a very high dimension obviously.
Its review opinions on the whole script and some of my writing paragraphs are completely better than all the real people around me. After using it for a period of time, I found its opinions on my scripts are particularly important, it can put forward very sharp and valuable suggestions, especially when I encourage it to criticize.
I don’t have so many people around me who have such deep cognition of film studies. Most people only understand one or two types of film at most. But it has at least 10,000 scripts in its database. I think it has the professional level of top Hollywood producers and top production talents from large content platforms who know best about content development, and its knowledge is even more comprehensive. As long as you specify the type accurately, it will give you a set of very precise evaluations.
Intelligent Emergence: Did you write “Love Letter” all by yourself? How long did it take?
Lu Chuan: It took me 57 days in total, I wrote nearly 10,000 lines of code, and the web version can already run. At that time, I also wanted to verify one thing: can these current AI tools enable an ordinary person to achieve freedom in software creation?
Intelligent Emergence: How did you write code by yourself?
Lu Chuan: I used current AI code generators, as well as a series of tools including Cursor, Codex, Workbuddy and so on.
When GPT 6.0 was released recently, I started using it immediately, and it was a very pleasant experience. When I was learning to read code, I found that code is very similar to natural language, you can at least understand it. Especially for many functional modules, it is very easy for you to read and understand them. Of course, I definitely can’t write code completely on my own, but AI helps me write, and I can understand the code and communicate with it. So I spent 57 days writing nearly 10,000 lines of code, completed “Love Letter”, and the web version has been put into operation.
Intelligent Emergence: Why do you insist on writing a software by yourself instead of using existing ready-made tools?
Lu Chuan: The foundation of current general large models is already very powerful, and the results they output can reach a level of 80 points out of 100. So what I want to do is to label the data with higher quality datasets, so that the model can distinguish good works from bad ones.
When I was developing this software, I wanted to make full use of AI’s knowledge base. In addition, I also want to distill all my own skills into the model, and then distill the skills of my father (Lu Tianming, national first-class screenwriter and famous writer) later, and then distill the skills of some of my friends. After working in this industry for so many years, I have a list of scripts that I think are extremely excellent. I don’t have enough money for large-scale training, but I think my data is optimal, it is not polluted, and the quality is very high.
Moreover, you will find that general models will cater to customer demands and gradually lower their standards. But I hope my tool, or my AI creation partner, can just tell the truth, be straightforward and sharp in comments, and not be too tactful and worldly.
Intelligent Emergence: You hope it is a tool that can maintain a high aesthetic standard?
Lu Chuan: I hope it can help us return to classic writing. Literary creation in the Internet age is actually a kind of counteraction against classic creation. Now we rarely see that kind of classic literary works. Two days ago I read a novel by Stephen King, I was really amazed. Its story is breathtaking, and the description of characters is extremely vivid. In contrast, after entering the Internet age, our current writing has weakened in terms of sense of power, skills and depth. So when I do data training, I hope this tool can guide writers and authors to return to the field of classic writing. It will carry my personal preferences and values.
If you insist that this tool can output a usable popular drama script with one click, it still can’t do that. That’s probably not my goal. I don’t want to make a tool that can be widely used by the public, but to make a tool for myself, just as I said before, to make a pair of crutches or a pair of glasses for myself, so I integrated my own aesthetic standards and attitude into it.
Intelligent Emergence: The images you chose are very special. Both crutches and glasses are things that help people maintain their original creative ability and walk on the original road when their physical functions decline, rather than a “cheat code” that makes people become extremely powerful out of thin air.
Lu Chuan: Yes, sometimes creation really needs company and encouragement. Making films is similar to riding a bicycle. Once you master the skill, or you have the talent for it in the first place, you can basically keep riding this bicycle all the time.
But on this road, sometimes you may lose courage. When you find that everyone is advocating entertainment supremacy and the times have changed, you may feel confused, re-examine yourself, and question your own aesthetic standards. Developing such a tool is also to help me maintain courage and aesthetic intuition, and avoid drifting with the tide.
Intelligent Emergence: Has anyone used it? What’s their feedback?
Lu Chuan: I asked the screenwriters of a project team in my company to try it. They thought it was very easy to use. After we input the data from previous interviews, the plot outline it summarized was very touching. Especially when summarizing the whole plot, after we input the interview data, the plot outline it generated moved us a lot.
Later, I handed it over to the engineers for deployment. They spent more than a month packaging and deploying it. I always thought this work should be finished in two or three days, but there were always errors, and we were fixing bugs recently. Later I found that know-how is very important. Engineers can realize the functions, but they don’t understand the creation scenarios behind these functions. For example, how to turn pages with the mouse is part of the writing experience in my opinion, but it may be just an insignificant interaction detail in their opinion. After you disassemble and repackage the software, the functions still exist, but the experience is gone. I can’t explain it clearly, I am a total layman in technology, and I don’t understand the language of engineers.
Intelligent Emergence: Did you give up solving this problem later?
Lu Chuan: I didn’t give up. I hope to communicate with these engineer friends in their own language. I made up my mind to learn it myself. About 50 days ago, I asked AI to make a 180-day model learning course for me, and I have been studying for almost 40 days now.
Intelligent Emergence: You said that sometimes you feel very helpless and badly need someone to talk to when you write. Can “Love Letter” write for you directly, so that you can skip this kind of distress?
Lu Chuan: If you really want it to write, it can also output a paragraph roughly, but most of the outputs can’t meet my usage standards. Up to now, it is almost impossible for it to output a complete high-quality script independently. But these large models have extremely strong capabilities as script doctors, and can provide very professional and judgmental review opinions.
Build the Laboratory on the Front Line
Intelligent Emergence: Your company Shuzhiyuan Entertainment Technology Group was originally a film and television production company. Is it now fully focused on AI?
Lu Chuan: It can’t be called fully focused on AI. The company still insists on traditional creation. Our work in the three tracks of film, series and cultural tourism is moving forward in an orderly manner. We will shoot a series this year, a theatrical animation film has already started shooting, another series will start shooting in November, and a low-cost film is under preparation.
But I have been using AI methods to assist my own creation. This kind of experience in creation is very powerful, so we set up a small AIGC laboratory together with Lenovo to study what impact AI will have on the film industry.
Now the R&D team mainly focuses on three directions. The first is R&D: using existing open-source models as the base, and using our own dataset for post-training, which is the foundation of all our work. The second is tool development: “
