Abstract
In May 2017, Xiao Bing, a popular Chinese chatbot built by Microsoft Research Asia, made her debut as a poet with Sunlight Has Lost Its Glass Windows, a collection marketed as the entirely created by artificial intelligence. She learnt the art of poetry by “reading” the works of 519 modern Chinese poets, and her “inspiration” comes from pictures provided first by her programmers and later by netizens, who upload photographs through her website. Xiao Bing’s emergence made a splash in Chinese society and raised grave concerns among the poets, who polemicized with her engineers. This essay traces Xiao Bing’s literary and media career, which includes both notable literary failures and notable commercial success, exploring her complex connections to technologies of power/knowledge as well as cultural phenomena that range from traditional Chinese poetry and poetry education to postmodern camp aesthetics. From within the renegotiation of the nature of poetry at the threshold of the posthuman era, I propose the critical notion of reading-as-playing to help poetry take advantage of its various entanglements and strictures in order to survive and co-shape the brave new world.
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