When humans become demons: China’s viral AI hit

(Edited and refined by Candice Chan, with the assistance of AI translation.)

On the morning of 18 August, Bilibili creator Cucumber Egg (青瓜蛋、) opened his creator dashboard to find it awash with comments and notifications. His first thought was: “I woke up thinking I’d been attacked online.”

The previous day, he had uploaded a 26-minute AI-generated animation, The Book of Supernatural Phenomena: Look to the People (《妖异簿·问苍生》), with a line from the film serving as its secondary title: “My biggest sin in life was writing that humans were demons (我这一生最大的罪，是把人写成了妖).”

The video quickly shot to the top of Bilibili’s site-wide rankings — by 24 August, it had been viewed more than 13 million times and received over one million likes.

Initially, much of the attention focused on the AI technology. Viewers were astonished that the characters, camera work and settings remained largely consistent throughout the 26-minute film, with many praising its “big-budget” quality. But within days, talk of the AI model had faded into the background. Instead, what people shared were lines from the film, and the dilemma confronting a court historian protagonist.

Human or demon?

Look to the People draws on Volume Six of In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记), compiled by Gan Bao during the Eastern Jin dynasty.

Strange omens from the Han dynasty — “yellow figures on temple walls”, “wood neither crooked nor straight” and “grass shaped like human beings” — appear only briefly in the ancient text. They are linked to the uprising led by Taoist healer Zhang Jiao and the eventual decline of the Han dynasty. The creator steps into these gaps in the historical record, imagining stories for the forgotten figures whose names never made it into history.

In the animation, a fictional clerk of the Imperial Library is ordered to investigate supernatural phenomena. But as his investigation progresses, the supernatural veneer falls away, revealing famine, forced labour, exploitation by officials and ordinary people struggling to stay alive in a time of chaos.

Throughout the story, the strange phenomena the imperial court sees as omens of troubled times turn out to bear the unmistakable imprint of human suffering. The clerk therefore faces two grim choices when putting brush to paper. If he records the phenomena as the work of humans, those involved could be branded rebels, with their families implicated as well. If he records them as supernatural occurrences, the survivors might escape persecution — but at the cost of being erased from history.

The protagonist therefore allows many people a chance to live by recording what they did as the work of demons. Yet in his old age, he laments: “My biggest sin in life was writing that humans were demons.”

At the end of the film, the words “When later generations read of demons, look not to ghosts and gods, but to the people” (后人读妖，勿问鬼神，问苍生) appear, and bullet comments flood the screen.

“If there were truly peace in this world, how could there be monsters?” one viewer writes. Another observes: “The script of history has never changed; only the actors are changed, wave after wave.”

From imagination to reality

One viewer was reminded of making a food delivery to a rented room on the outskirts of a city, where the order was just a few kilograms of rice and several eggs. In that building, they also saw a gaunt elderly man squatting as he boiled water over an outdoor stove. Just like that, the starving people of the Eastern Han seemed to have travelled a thousand years, landing in the modern day.

The film contains no explicit contemporary references, and its creator has stated that all its characters and events are fictional. Yet by asking who has the power to name things, who gets to write the historical record and whose suffering is allowed into official history, the story inevitably casts familiar shadows across the ruins of antiquity.

The Eastern Han is distant enough for many things to be said in period costume. Yet it is not so distant that audiences cannot hear the echoes between the lines.

This is where online opinion begins to divide. Some read lines such as “You were not born to kneel” and “Yellow Heaven stands above all who refuse to kneel” as using the past to speak to the present. Others argue that reading contemporary meaning into fictional dialogue drawn from historical legends is simply overinterpretation.

The animation has also sparked an equally lively debate about AI. Supporters say the technology allows a lone creator to marshal armies of thousands. Critics worry that AI-generated imagery could squeeze film-industry professionals out of work, while raising questions about training data and creative ownership. One viewer offered a straightforward verdict: “AI dramas are like live-action dramas; the most important thing is the script.”

When asked about the work’s sudden viral success, Cucumber Egg said simply that the script grew out of an essay he had written several years earlier. Only later did he use AI models to generate the images and video, before shaping the finished work through storyboarding and editing.

What AI can and cannot do

AI models can conjure palaces, blizzards and displaced people, but they cannot decide for themselves why a historian should feel guilty. AI generation is the brush and ink. For a work to capture people’s attention, the creator must first have something worth expressing.

The content industry has become highly sophisticated at upgrading technology, deploying capital and maximising traffic. But what truly moves people cannot be reduced to parameters or algorithms. It begins with whom a creator chooses to see and whose names they choose to preserve. It also lies in what a work chooses to leave unsaid — the space it leaves for audiences to enter the story, make connections and arrive at their own interpretations.

The viral success of Look to the People is a reminder to the content industry that audiences have not lost their appetite for complex stories. Technology may make them stop and take notice, but what stays with them in the end is still the human predicament, and the questions the creator has woven into the work.

And in an age when AI technology is advancing at breakneck speed, innovation depends on allowing different ideas and approaches to coexist. A culture with sufficiently deep roots should be able to accommodate scepticism about AI, competing interpretations of metaphor and even sharply opposing views.

A creative environment that leaves room for a hundred flowers to bloom should also leave room for more people to tell their stories — without first being cast as demons in the historical record.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “《问苍生》爆火 稀缺的仍是人味”.

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