Returned to the Land, Shut the Door on Visitors — But Sentenced to Ten Years by AI Rumours
If I were ravenous to learn, I might have struck up a chat with an all-knowing AI that grasps astronomy and geography alike. But the trouble is, the current me has no drive to advance — all that occupies my mind and eyes is Villain Valley’s little patch of ground, shut the door and live under my own sky. None of AI’s eighteen martial arts are of any use to me.
Back then, I still thought of myself as a relic of the AI age — well water and river water, never meeting. AI could glide as light as a shadow through the skies of human wisdom, while I worked the ridges and furrows between the paths, living life with my own hands. Every day, my main task and greatest wish was simply to muddle about in the fields — weeding, tilling, harvesting vegetables, eating melons. The sweat and toil, the sweetness of the harvest — all of it had to be done by hand and tasted by mouth. This is something AI cannot do, and even if it could, I wouldn’t let it: it’s not just my business, it’s my pleasure. Finding time to write a little piece for Foodthink is another irreplaceable bodily experience — every line, every paragraph typed out by my own hands, nothing to do with AI.
But in the end, human planning can never outmatch fate’s. This year is the Year of the Snake, Yi Si, and it’s my birth-sign year. I’ve always heard people say the birth-sign year is a year of tribulation. At the start of the year, I saw off my eighty-eight-year-old mother; I thought that was the worst trial fate had in store for me. Little did I know that AI had a far greater catastrophe in wait.
I. Baidu Is Telling You to Go to Jail
Apart from wheat and oilseed rape grown over the winter, peanuts are the earliest of Fujian’s local crops to be harvested each year. Sown at the vernal equinox, harvested at Major Heat, they show a visible change every single day after planting; the entire process is a joy.
The greatest joy, though, is the harvest. Villain Valley plants peanuts every year. The first year was the worst — we didn’t even recoup the seed. Later the best yield was ten to fifteen kilos of dried peanuts, barely enough to save as seed. You’d pick out the bad ones and nibble miserly at the rest — not even enough to fill a tooth gap. In 2025 sincerity moved heaven and earth: with only half harvested, the fresh peanuts already topped fifty kilos, even eating freely you couldn’t finish them, ha ha ha ha ha ha …
It was the height of the three fu days, the third day of Major Heat, the hottest stretch of the year. I was in the fields at six, at first light, intending to finish that patch before lunch. By past ten, the heat and thirst were unbearable, so I went back to drink. I grabbed my phone for a quick scroll while drinking, and the first glance nearly made me choke. A message from a friend in Xi’an, arriving from a thousand li away: Baidu AI had sentenced me to ten years in prison, on the charge of “extortion” — a label steeped in moral stigma.
Baidu had slapped a wholly irrelevant charge on me and declared it matter-of-factly: “Baidu AI summarised 54 genuine experiences from across the web.” The rumour came fully footnoted, properly formatted, even enlisting the court and the procuratorate to vouch for it: “On 23 January 2025, the Shanghai Putuo District People’s Procuratorate initiated public prosecution, and the court sentenced her to ten years and three months of fixed-term imprisonment on charges of extortion.” The charge was clear and specific, the sentence precise down to the odd months. The books I had written, the charitable work I had done, the NGO I had founded — all listed behind it, paraded as if I were in the dock. More authentic than the real thing.
I shut my door and lived under my own sky for so many years — who have I ever wronged?
II. The First AI Defamation Case Against Baidu
This time, Baidu AI’s bucket of shit, tailor-made just for me, taught me I was wrong. The rumour pointed squarely at me. Ignore it, and I would be defined by it — stripped of my innocence. Fight it in court, and I would be hostage to it — stripped of my life.
Since that sunlit noon when earth and sky changed colour, my life has been hijacked by Baidu.
I sued Baidu AI for defamation. The case opened on 11 December 2025 at the Beijing Internet Court — the first documented AI defamation case in China. I am not the only human harmed by AI; since then, more and more such cases have made their way to court.
On the same day, Robin Li was honoured in the American magazine TIME. The magazine named its 2025 Persons of the Year to eight “Architects of AI”: Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Lisa Su of AMD, Elon Musk of xAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Stanford scientist Fei-Fei Li. Robin Li was also interviewed by TIME alongside Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. Two pioneering events concerning AI, unfolding on the same day — surely nothing more than coincidence.
Baidu refused mediation, determined to make a landmark case. In court they said I was “harming technological innovation” by pursuing my claim, and declared that they spoke “not just for Baidu but for the entire industry,” demanding that I accept a “public-figure tolerance” standard.
In the courtroom, Baidu was composed, at ease, handling everything with ease; I was scrambling, tumbling, barely keeping it together. Outside the courtroom, my life had been defined by Baidu AI — smeared as an extortionist sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. In my daily life I was compelled to spend precious hours on Baidu AI, researching how to understand and counter Baidu’s lawyers’ outlandish arguments and their “godly” logic, at the levels of law and internet technology — in the end, I was “AI’d” after all.
III. A Finite Life, an Infinite AI
Those days without touching a phone for a whole day or going online for a week are gone for ever. Who can fathom what it is like, constantly watching for the harm a phone brings you?
I was not only “passively AI’d” by Baidu’s AI-generated rumour, but also “AI’d” by the lawsuit against Baidu, becoming a heavy user of Baidu AI. Baidu is a tech firm with proprietary technical barriers, a seasoned legal team, and years of litigation experience. Facing all manner of specialist and legal questions, my only option was to use Baidu’s own AI as the spear against Baidu’s own shield.
In engaging with and using AI, I felt its “omniscience and omnipotence” at a visceral level — one simply cannot deny it. AI not only harmed me; it also helped me.
And in that same engagement I developed a bodily awareness: in this age of artificial intelligence, the internet truly seems to have acquired a kind of “vitality”. When that vitality does evil, it is a darkly seductive sorcerer in black robes, dragging people into an abyss of drowning. At ten thousand paces of concession — even as a neutral tool, even as the hand that punctures lies — AI still grips a person’s time, energy and autonomy like a suction cup, and people sink into it, grow drunk on it.
Perhaps some enjoy that feeling, need to interact with AI. But after the seduction wore off, I felt unmistakable physical unease. I too was swept up in the moment — intoxicated, excited, exhilarated — yet every high ended in a hollow, aching sense of loss. I prefer a state of greater agency. Even now that AI has become a routine tool of mine, I would rather keep a slightly greater distance from artificial intelligence.
As long as energy and computing capacity hold out, AI will remain vast, limitless and tireless. I, as a specific individual, am finite — finite in time and energy, in the directions I can attend to and in the purposes I set for my life. So I must control how I use AI, rather than be used by it.
IV. Who Is the Master, Who Is the Guest?
Eight years back from the day the trial opened, on 11 December 2017, something else happened — the world barely noticed, but for me it was momentous. I moved my meagre belongings into a farmhouse in Shengou Village, Yilan, Taiwan, and began my life as a farmer.
Shengou is known as ‘Taiwan’s premier organic farming village.’ I was a much-loved brewing master there, and also a small-name living-skills teacher. I published two books about food and drink and made countless food-and-drink friends.
Two years later, when I left Taiwan, I resolved to come back and, with my own two hands, build a self-sufficient, one-person farm where I could shut the door and live under my own sky.
Taiwan’s organic agriculture, like its industrialisation, preceded ours on the other side of the Strait by two decades. The ills of urban–rural imbalance and widespread health problems came with it, so the efforts and experiments of visionaries there also preceded ours.
After the Industrial Revolution, humanity marched forward, trumpeting its arrival in a new age as it bade farewell to the pastoral. Life grew ever more colourful, yet people grew ever further from the land. Every country, in its march through industrialisation and modernisation, reaches a peak in average life expectancy — and also a “peak of modern diseases” — then an ageing society, the hollowing-out of rural areas and a host of other problems follow in succession. Only then do people begin to turn their eyes back to the countryside, back to the fields, back to the road by which we came.
Tao Yuanming cried, ‘Return, then! The fields and gardens are going to waste.’ Now the problem facing a modern person born in the city, like me, is not the overgrowing of the fields but their very absence. As humanity entered the age of the internet, over ninety per cent of the farming folk around me in Shengou were “city folk” like that: no personal farming experience, no family land. What happens when a generation like that tries to return to the soil?
By 2025, Villain Valley had achieved basic self-sufficiency — a complete food chain with zero external purchases, salt aside. In these four years at Villain Valley, AI exploded onto the scene, the world entered the age of AI, and I stepped back, one pace at a time, into the age of agriculture.
Return, then! ‘I pray you, cease your social calls and end your wanderings.’ “Plough and daydream; shut the door, no visitors” — these words hang at the gate of Villain Valley. I am shutting the door to live under my own sky, earning my keep by my own labour. A supportive community of neighbours is surely important, but what matters above all will always be the land, the sunlight, and the water. Give me those, and I am not afraid to start from nothing. Working alone is hard, of course — so let it take a little longer.
I am giving myself fifteen years. By seventy, I hope to have built an ideal homestead, self-sufficient in water and electricity: whatever I want to eat, I can grow it. I want to complete soil amendment across the entire property, go fully no-till, build a food forest over the whole estate, and reach a state of permaculture.
But I never imagined that the most formidable trial I would face on this land, with its distinctly Chinese characteristics, would come not from the soil but from a rumour hurled at me like a bolt from the blue by Baidu AI.
At Villain Valley, I normally go without a phone. I savour the feeling of giving my whole self over to an exchange with the earth. Whether it is the peanut field or the paddy, or the vegetable patch, between every sowing and every harvest there are countless weedings, feedings, and all manner of field management. Each crop has its own needs, its own unforeseen troubles, and its own particular nourishment. Yes, I said nourishment. Being here in the fields, simply messing about with the land, is a joy in itself — a process that nourishes the person. When the work is done, I laze in the hammock, daydream, or leaf through a paper book with no purpose in mind — that is nourishment too. Scrolling a phone, it is not.
I cannot bear a life with body and mind hung on a phone. One cannot say for certain whether a person is using the phone, or the phone is using the person. I prefer the phone to stay out of the fields and out of the bedroom. After Mother passed, I even considered giving it up altogether — truly to cease all socialising and cut off all outings. In this world, there was no longer any reason for anyone to reach me at any hour.
Giving up the phone is not truly cutting oneself off from the world, from the internet, from the age. I can still type at a computer and write for Foodthink. I still have my own WeChat Official Account and pop up from time to time. Being able to “shut the door and turn visitors away” while maintaining a bounded connection with the outside world, to define on my own terms my relationship with the world — that is, in truth, taking back the initiative from a life ruled by the outside, by the network. Being one’s own master. Embracing the sun, drawing close to the land, one mouthful of greens, one mouthful of rice — living life with one’s own hands.
For further details on the author’s AI lawsuits against Baidu, please follow her personal Coze Official Account, Shut the Door and Live Under My Own Sky
Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article are provided by the author
Editor: Xiaodan