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Written by Jiang Xiaoyu

While people are waiting to see when AI will take away their jobs, a 9-year-old primary school student in Beijing wrote a novel with the help of AI and earned 20,000 yuan in royalties.

How did he do this seemingly incredible thing? In addition, he also brought an inspiration: facing the AI ​​era, what attitude should the public who are not familiar with AI take? Especially the parents' generation, facing the "natives of the AI ​​era", what kind of educational policy should be adopted in the AI ​​education of children.

Xu Mengmeng (pen name) is a third-grade boy studying at an experimental primary school in Xicheng District, Beijing. In April this year, his book "AI Boy: The Great Challenge of Survival on Mars" was officially published. The full text is 70,000 to 80,000 words, priced at 49.90 yuan, and the first print run is 5,000 copies.

The book tells the story of a little boy named "Mengmeng" (the same name as himself), who went to the Science and Technology Museum with his other two friends, Qiuqiu and Fanqie, to participate in the "Mars Survival Challenge Camp". Under the guidance of the on-site artificial intelligence assistant "Congcong", Mengmeng put on VR equipment to enter the virtual world of "Mars", and successfully escaped from danger and returned to Earth alone.

After the book was published, it was reprinted within a month and sold more than 6,000 copies by the end of the month. Xiao Xiao, the planning editor in charge of the book, said: "We are working hard to sell 10,000 copies."

In the increasingly severe book retail market, industry insiders have a "conventional saying" that a new book can be considered a "bestseller" if it sells 10,000 copies within one year of publication. According to this "indicator", the young author Xu Mengmeng is not far from becoming a "bestseller author".

Good sales are the result, the key lies in the writing process.One reason is that the author Xu Mengmeng is only 9 years old, and the other is that Xu Mengmeng participated in the creation of this book with the help of AI.

Let me first talk about the details of Mengmeng writing a book, which was somewhat "an accidental outcome".

Last September, Mengmeng's father, the "webmaster", met Huang Xiaodao, a friend who runs an AI community, for the first time through the introduction of a good friend. Mengmeng's father runs a website focusing on adult vocational education. The purpose of the two parties meeting was to see if they could come up with an "AI+education" project.

At that meeting, Huang Xiaodao also brought along another good friend, Ms. Xiaoxiao, a planning editor at the Publishing House of Electronics Industry, who was responsible for editing and publishing the book “Everyone Can Make Money Playing ChatGPT”.

After the meeting, everyone had a great time chatting about their common interest in AI. Xu Mengmeng's father, the "webmaster", said that a few days ago, he and his son Mengmeng had just made a game demo using AI and also did a math problem using ChatGPT.

This reminded Teacher Xiaoxiao of a planned topic that she had not yet implemented - she hoped to find an adult and a child to use AI to write an AI science story book for children.

Before this, Xiaoxiao had approached several adult authors, and some of them did not continue to move forward after their outlines or manuscripts were overturned. This situation is very common. She sent out 100 invitations, and only about 10% of the authors could submit their manuscripts.

Seeing that the webmaster's family had done some research on AI, and after hearing Teacher Xiaoxiao's plan, the webmaster was also eager to try it out. Later, after discussing it with Mengmeng, the two sides hit it off.

But it is easier said than done. When it came to writing the book, not only did the webmaster and his son Xu Mengmeng have different ideas, but his father also lost his patience and "quit the project at the speed of light". Because his mother did not understand AI, she could only focus on "writing books to accompany the family", leaving Mengmeng alone in the family to fight alone.

Fortunately, Mengmeng has such a trait - persistence. In the eyes of his mother, his son's academic performance is "above average" in the class, but he is worry-free - that is, he has a strong sense of self-management.

From September 2023 to January 2024, Mengmeng successively gave three versions of the book outline until the last version was successfully passed.

It was winter vacation at that time, and Mengmeng had time to finish this 70,000-80,000-word story. A few months later, "AI Boy: Mars Survival Challenge" was published and achieved great success. Based on the sales progress, the royalties have earned more than 20,000 yuan.

So, how did 9-year-old Mengmeng use AI to write a book?

Let's start with the results. The scene descriptions in Meng Meng's book "AI Boy: Mars Survival Challenge" are basically AI-generated. According to Meng Meng's mother, "If I really let him write it by himself, he wouldn't be able to write to this level." She is familiar with her son's stories - they are often jumpy, and the plot pops out "like a little fish blowing bubbles."

When Wang Xiaocong, the editor-in-chief of the book, saw the first draft submitted by Mengmeng, she was also a little shocked. She thought it would be full of typos, grammatical errors and logical confusion, "after all, the author is only a third-grade student." But after reading the preface and the first two chapters carefully, she was very surprised, "The writing level and logical thinking ability are far beyond the peers."

Then, on the book’s endpapers, there are three finger-sized cartoon busts printed on the book’s endpapers, which were also created using AI tools (ChatGPT’s DALLE-2) - that is, AI makes pictures.

This is also a workplace skill that many office workers have just mastered within two years. The specific method is that Mengmeng "feeds" ChatGPT with real-life photos of herself, Qiuqiu, and Tomato, outputs descriptive text to it, and then generates cartoon pictures.

When writing the first version of the outline, the title and main line of the outline was "AI Adventure: The Fun of Exploring with ChatGPT". As the proposed title suggests, ChatGPT will be one of the protagonists throughout the book.

Mengmeng's father, "Webmaster", is a programmer by profession, but he is not very familiar with the field of artificial intelligence, just like a chef who can stir-fry may not be able to make mousse cake. The relevant knowledge of ChatGPT and the development of clues in the book all depend on the exploration of the father and son.

However, in the process of experiencing and using ChatGPT, Mengmeng found that although it is relatively "smart", it also has prominent shortcomings. It is not compatible with Android phones. Mengmeng often "crashes" when experiencing and using ChatGPT on domestic phones. Dad had to debug the device, and Dad joked that "this is one of the few moments when he can play a role."

The result of debugging is that the two people can only use ChatGPT on the computer, which has poor portability and low stability.

During this process, the problems encountered by Mengmeng and his son also attracted the attention of editor Xiaoxiao. "If we want to recommend AI to children in China, we must use domestic big data models," Xiaoxiao suggested.

So the first version of the outline was scrapped.

When writing the second version of the outline, Meng Meng thought of the title and main line of the outline as "AI Youth". This inspiration came from the "Tang Xiaotuan's Journey into Chinese History" series he had read. Meng Meng also wanted to imitate the storytelling style of this series, starting with the Turing machine model invented by mathematician Alan Turing, and introducing the history of AI development.

In the writing process of this version, Mengmeng used the domestic large model - Zhipu Qingyan, and a small amount of ChatGPT. However, the result written by Zhipu Qingyan contained a lot of professional terms and was not suitable for children to read, so this version was eventually PASSed.

The third and final version is a story based on the "Mars Survival Challenge". The protagonist Meng Meng in the story has to survive in a virtual reality environment and find a way back to Earth within 5 days. The editor thought this story was interesting and kept it.

Although it is a children's story, it is not easy to write well and correctly.

In terms of knowledge, Mengmeng mainly obtains relevant professional knowledge by asking questions to Zhipu Qingyan. For example, if he asks: How can we survive on Mars? Zhipu Qingyan will tell him, "Oxygen, drinking water, food, energy."

Meng Meng mentioned that if the AI's answer does not meet the requirements, he will input instructions multiple times. "The clearer the instructions, the more in line with expectations." Baidu founder Robin Li once said,“In 10 years, 50% of jobs will be cue engineering.”What I mean is that knowing how to input prompt words is very important, which is also the inspiration Mengmeng gained from practice.

As for the text level of the book, how to choose words and construct sentences? Mengmeng's approach is to make the conceived plot into prompt words, input them into Zhipu Qingyan and ChatGPT, and let them write sentences according to the requirements.

In terms of self-review of the text, Meng Meng will find resources to proofread and verify the content output by AI. In addition, he will give all the texts after writing to Zhipu Qingyan to check for grammatical errors and make some modifications, which is equivalent to putting clothes on the article.

Mengmeng also found that AI is not without mistakes. When writing a book, Mengmeng asked AI to calculate the distance from Earth to Mars. He has always liked Mars and has read a lot of relevant information. He vaguely felt that the numbers were not right. He found that AI made a mistake when converting kilometers into light years. He realized that AI could also "talk nonsense", so he paid more attention to identifying online information.

In the process of writing the book, Mengmeng used so many AI tools and gained a deep understanding of the personality of each tool. He said: "These tools are like different people, with quite different 'personalities'. Zhipu Qingyan is like a Chinese student who is good at liberal arts, ChatGPT is like a foreigner who is good at science and can speak English, and Midjourney is very difficult to communicate with."

In Mengmeng's mind, AI tools are like his good friends - always online and super knowledgeable. He summarized three experiences on how to get along with AI friends - communicate more, communicate well, and be yourself.

Mengmeng's story of successfully writing a book and selling it well has also inspired the adults around her.

Mengmeng's mother's biggest feeling is "saving mother time". "If I don't have time, he will ask AI." Mengmeng's father said that his friends heard that his son wrote a book using AI and they were amazed: "AI is so powerful, why do we still need people?"

As far as the current public consensus is concerned, AI is more of a tool at this stage and humans still need to exercise their subjective initiative.

Dad, the "webmaster", believes that Mengmeng has accumulated knowledge through long-term reading. He has ideas and a desire to express himself, so he can build a good "framework" when writing.

Many of her colleagues also asked: "Mom, did you force your son to write this?" After Mengmeng knew this, she showed a strong awareness and ability of "self-time management".

Mengmeng said, "I signed the publishing contract. If I can't submit the manuscript, I have to pay compensation." When signing the contract, Mengmeng filled in the submission date himself. At that time, the adults thought he filled it in casually. Later, his mother found out that he filled in the date of the start of winter vacation. Mengmeng thought that he must submit the manuscript before the start of school.

In fact, Mengmeng did the same. His mother remembered that when Mengmeng finished writing, he quickly and loudly closed his computer with a "snap", packed his luggage and went to Jianfengling to watch birds - this is his other hobby, and another hobby is drones. Mengmeng has recorded 219 bird species at the China Bird Watching Record Center, ranking 686th in the country. His photography works won the first prize in the 2022 Beijing Primary and Secondary School Bird Watching Competition Bird Ecology Photography Competition, and won the first prize in the 8th National Youth Drone Competition in 2024.

The mother felt that her son was trained in the process of writing the book, such as keeping promises and persistence.

As a "post-2010", Mengmeng is a native of the Internet and is considered to find using electronic devices as natural as breathing.When he was in the middle class of kindergarten, he already had a mobile phone, iPad and computer.

Mengmeng has a lot of feelings about using AI. He believes that unlike office software such as Word and PPT, current AI tools are easy to use. If children have ideas, as long as they persist, they can also use AI to write.

The fact that 9-year-old Meng Meng wrote a book is not an isolated case. Teenagers are more adaptable to embracing AI than we think.

Zhang Xiaoxing lives in Hangzhou and is a 14-year-old junior high school student. He has never taken a programming class. He has been self-studying C++, Go, JavaScript, Python and other programming languages ​​by searching online for information since he was a child. When he was in the third grade of elementary school, he made a webpage called "Wall", which allowed classmates and teachers to leave messages and pass information on the webpage.

Last year, as artificial intelligence big model technology emerged, he trained the model himself, developed and open-sourced the Go language version SDK of Zhipu AI.

Not long ago, Zhang Xiaoxing participated in the AI ​​NPC project of UltraBrain AI Incubator, and successfully implemented the MVP (minimum viable product) of AI NPC with two different technical routes together with middle school students and college students. This technology will be applied to various online and offline MOBA game scenarios in the future, making NPC smarter when interacting with players.

Because this project involves a wide range of technical aspects, Zhang Xiaoxing and his colleagues often need to seek help from "external assistance". Without AI assistance, these tasks would take 3 to 4 adult programmers a long time to complete.

This year, Zhang Xiaoxing also wrote eight songs using an AI tool called Suno and released them on NetEase Cloud Music. Every time he finished writing a song, he would gather his family together to listen to it. Now, his ten-year-old sister Xiaoyu also writes songs using Suno, and "they are pretty good."

Children's learning of AI has recently received attention from all walks of life.

During this year's Two Sessions, National People's Congress representative Lei Jun prepared four proposals, one of which was to popularize artificial intelligence literacy education from the compulsory education stage.

On March 28 this year, the Ministry of Education issued four actions to promote AI-enabled education, aiming to use AI to promote the integration of teaching and learning and improve the digital education literacy and skills of all people. The National Smart Education Public Service Platform launched the "AI Learning" column, inviting "big names" to talk about AI, organizing famous teachers to teach AI, and encouraging teachers and students to learn AI.

The wind of AI has also blown to remote rural areas.

On September 20 last year, the wind of artificial intelligence blew to the Heshi Town Central Primary School in Xiushui County, Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province. "Special post teacher" Shen Kuiyuan worked hard for the children in his hometown and built the first AI science and technology museum in a rural primary school in China. Shen Kuiyuan hopes that the children can be exposed to more advanced scientific and technological achievements and create more possibilities for them to embrace the world.

AI is an opportunity for the present and future generations. If we wait and see, we may lose the chance to seize the opportunity.

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