At a recent graduation season event, a forum discussion centered on the future for graduates in the AI era. The host of the She Nicest women's tech and culture community, Tuotuo, highlighted a significant shift: demand-side individuals are now becoming product developers directly. By simply describing their needs in natural language, users can create products. Consequently, AI's primary impact is not job elimination but efficiency enhancement, leading to increased individual workloads with expectations for two to three times the previous output. Young people are finding themselves in the position of needing to manage AI before they have even learned traditional management skills.
The prevalent narrative of the "one-person company," she argued, essentially shifts risk from organizations to individuals and is not something to be celebrated uncritically.
A signed author for Zhihu's Salt Story, known as "Bored Fairy," commented on the saturation of AI-generated fiction in the market, noting that readers are growing tired of the repetitive tropes produced in bulk. The authors who are truly succeeding financially, she suggested, are those crafting stories manually. In her view, while AI can generate text, it cannot provide emotional value. The core competitiveness of fiction lies in the author's unique spirit and their insights into life.
Art creator Ge Yulu offered a perspective from the arts, observing that many technology-focused works from art academies still treat AI as an object—for instance, through heavy use of sound, light, electricity, and screens—without truly integrating it. He advocates for using AI as naturally as one uses a word processor. He believes AI intervenes in the world governed by language, but humans possess a wealth of "tacit knowledge," such as understanding scents, spatial awareness, muscle memory, and interpersonal trust.
In addition to the forum discussions, the event featured a graduation exhibition titled "After the Answer," showcasing over 40 works from the class of 2026 graduates across the country. The exhibition aimed to demonstrate how young people in the AI era are creating and defining themselves through their work.
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