Retreat to the Countryside, Then a Ten-Year Sentence Over AI Rumours
If I were genuinely eager to learn, I might have sought out an omniscient AI for a chat. But the reality is that I’ve stopped striving. My mind and eyes are fixed solely on my own little patch in the Valley of Villains, living life with the door bolted shut. None of artificial intelligence’s myriad tricks have any use for me.
Back then, I still considered myself a relic of the pre-AI age, content to let AI and I coexist like well water and river water, never crossing paths. While AI glides gracefully across the firmament of human intellect, I till the soil between the furrows, living my days out with my own two hands. My primary task, and greatest wish, each day is to simply spend time in the fields: weeding, planting, harvesting vegetables, and eating melons. The sweat and toil, and the sweetness of the harvest, must all be done and tasted by myself. AI cannot do this. And even if it could, I wouldn’t hand it over: this is not just my labour, it is my joy. When I find the time to write a short piece for Foodthink, it is likewise an irreplaceable physical experience: every line, every paragraph, is typed out by my own hands. AI has no part in it.
But ultimately, human plans cannot rival fate’s design. This is the Year of the Snake, Yisi, my zodiac year, and I’ve always heard that one’s zodiac year brings tribulation. After seeing off my eighty-eight-year-old mother earlier this year, I believed that was the hardest trial I would face. I had no idea that AI was yet to bring me a far greater calamity.
I. Baidu Tells You to Go to Prison
Apart from overwintering wheat and rapeseed, peanuts are the earliest locally grown crop to be harvested in Fujian within a single year. Sown at the spring equinox and harvested during the Major Heat solar term, every day after planting brings visible changes; the entire process is a genuine joy.
But the greatest pleasure of all is the harvest itself. We’ve been growing peanuts at the Valley of Villains year after year. The first season was the worst—we didn’t even recover enough to replant. In later years, the best we managed was 10 to 15 kg of dry peanuts, just enough to save for seed. We’d pick out the imperfect ones and nibble on them sparingly, not even enough to keep us going. In 2025, perseverance finally paid off. With only half the crop brought in, we had already surpassed 50 kg of fresh peanuts, so we can eat them without holding back and still not finish them all—hahahaha…
It was the third stage of the dog days, the third day of the Great Heat solar term—the very peak of the summer heat. I went out to the fields at dawn, just after six, hoping to finish that plot before lunch. By just past ten, however, the heat and thirst became unbearable, so I went back for water. As I drank, I picked up my phone to take a quick look, and what I saw made me choke. A message from a friend in Xi’an had travelled thousands of miles to reach me: I had already been sentenced to ten years in prison by Baidu AI, charged with “extortion”—a crime carrying a heavy moral stigma.
Baidu had fastened a completely unrelated charge to my name, stating with unwavering certainty that this was “Baidu AI summarising 54 authentic cases from across the web”. The fabrication came complete with citations, followed a strict format, and even enlisted courts and procuratorates to lend it authority: “On 23 January 2025, the Putuo District People’s Procuratorate in Shanghai filed a public prosecution, and the court sentenced the defendant to ten years and three months in prison for extortion.” The charge was precise, the term exact down to the month. The books I have written, the charitable work I have done, and the non-profit organisations I have founded were all listed alongside, paraded as accessories to the crime. It was more convincing than reality itself.
I have kept my door shut and tended my fields for all these years. What harm have I done to anyone?
II. The First Baidu AI Defamation Case
This time, however, the tailor-made smear from Baidu’s AI proved me wrong. The rumour was precise and unmistakably aimed at me. To ignore it would mean letting the fabrication define me, robbing me of my good name; to sue over it would mean letting it hold my life hostage.
Ever since that sun-drenched noon when the skies turned dark, my life has been held to ransom by Baidu.
I took Baidu’s AI to court for defamation, and the case came before the Beijing Internet Court on 11 December 2025. It stands as China’s first recorded AI defamation lawsuit. I am not the only human to have suffered at the hands of artificial intelligence; since then, an increasing number of similar cases have reached the courtroom.
On that very same day, Robin Li was featured in the US edition of *TIME*. The magazine named eight “Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year: 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. Consequently, Li also sat down for an interview with *TIME* alongside Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. Two pioneering developments concerning AI unfolding on the exact same day was, of course, pure coincidence.
Baidu outright refused mediation, determined to fight a precedent-setting case. In court, Baidu claimed that holding them to account would “harm technological innovation,” insisting it was speaking “not just for Baidu, but for the entire industry,” and demanding that I, as a public figure, exercise “tolerance.”
In the courtroom, Baidu moved with calm assurance, while I scrambled frantically, barely keeping up. Outside the courtroom, my life was being defined by Baidu’s AI, which smeared me as an extortionist deserving a decade behind bars. Day to day, I was forced to devote precious hours to Baidu’s AI, studying how to decipher and counter the legal team’s bizarre arguments and convoluted reasoning from both legal and technological standpoints. In the end, I was, quite literally, AI-ed.
III. A Finite Life, An Infinite AI
Those days when I could go a day without touching a phone or a week without going online are long gone. Who can truly understand the toll of constantly monitoring my phone?
I found myself forced to turn to Baidu AI not only because of the false rumours it generated, but also because of the legal battle with Baidu itself. In a sense, I was “made” to use it, becoming a heavy user of their AI platform. Baidu is a technology firm with substantial technical barriers, backed by a seasoned legal team and extensive litigation experience. To navigate the myriad technical and legal challenges, my only recourse was to use Baidu AI itself—turning their own tools against them.
Through my engagement with and daily use of AI, I was struck by its apparent omniscience and omnipotence—a reality one simply has to accept. AI has not only caused me harm; it has also been of considerable help.
My time with AI has given rise to a distinct physical sensation: as the internet transitions into the age of artificial intelligence, it truly seems to have acquired a kind of “life force”. When this force turns malicious, it resembles a sinister demon clad in black, dragging one into an abyss. But even setting that aside, and considering it merely as a neutral instrument or an aid in exposing falsehoods, AI possesses a leech-like quality. It drains time, energy, and autonomy, drawing people in until they become hopelessly ensnared and entranced.
Some may relish this sensation and thrive on interacting with AI, but I am left with a pronounced sense of physical discomfort whenever I feel I am losing myself to it. Even when the experience brings moments of intoxication, excitement, and thrill, the aftermath invariably leaves a lingering sense of emptiness. I value a more assertive state of mind for myself; so even though AI has become a staple tool in my daily routine, I still prefer to maintain a healthier distance from it.
As long as power and computing capacity remain uninterrupted, AI is boundless and tireless. I, by contrast, am a finite individual with limited time, limited energy, and finite focus and purpose in life. Therefore, I must be the one to control my use of AI, rather than allowing it to control me.
IV. Who is the host, and who is the guest?
Counting back eight years from the date of the trial, on 11 December 2017, something else happened. The world carried on without a ripple, yet it was a turning point for me. With little more than a simple bag, I moved into a farmhouse in Shengou Village, Yilan, in Taiwan, and began my life as a farmer.
Shengou is renowned as ‘Taiwan’s Pioneer Village of Organic Farming.’ I became the village’s popular brewer, a modestly known instructor for lifestyle workshops, published two books on food and drink, and built a wide circle of friends over shared meals and cups.
Two years later, I left Taiwan with the intention of returning to build, with my own hands, a self-sufficient one-person farm. It would be a place where I could shut the door, face only the sky, and live in simple isolation.
Taiwan’s organic farming movement, much like its industrialisation, was twenty years ahead of that on the other side of the strait. With it came the same structural divides between city and countryside, and the same widespread health concerns. Consequently, the pioneering efforts and experiments of forward-thinking advocates also began long before ours.
In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, humanity marched forward, leaving the pastoral life behind for a new age. Our lives grew ever more varied, yet drifted further from the soil. Every nation reaches a peak in average life expectancy alongside industrialisation and modernisation—a peak that also marks the height of ‘modern ailments.’ Thereafter, challenges such as an ageing population and rural hollowing-out follow in quick succession. Only then do some begin to turn their gaze back to the countryside, to rural living, and to the path from which humanity came.
Tao Yuanming penned *Gui Qu Lai Xi*, sighing that his fields were left to overgrow. Yet today, modern people like myself, born in cities, face not overgrown fields, but a complete absence of them. In this age of the internet, over ninety per cent of the fellow farmers I knew in Shengou were ‘city dwellers’ like me, possessing neither personal farming experience nor family land. What transpires when this generation attempts to return to the soil?
By 2025, Wicked Men’s Valley has reached a baseline of self-sufficiency, maintaining a fully closed food chain with zero external purchases, save for salt. Over these four years within the valley, artificial intelligence has surged ahead, ushering the world into the AI era, while I have taken steady steps back into an agrarian age.
“Return to Dwell; let me sever social ties and end my wanderings.” “Till the soil, drift in thought, keep the door shut to visitors,” hangs at the entrance to Wicked Men’s Valley. I wish to seal myself away, face only the sky, and earn my keep through honest labour. The surrounding support network is certainly vital, but the essentials have always been land, sunlight, and water. With those in hand, I harbour no fear of starting from nothing. Though solitary toil is undeniably arduous, the path simply demands more time.
I have allowed myself fifteen years. My hope is that by the time I reach seventy, I will have built an ideal homestead complete with self-sufficient water and electricity, where I can have whatever food I desire. I aim to finish soil restoration across the entire plot, adopt comprehensive no-till practices, establish a food forest throughout the property, and finally settle into a state of sustainability.
Yet I never imagined that the most severe trial I would face on this land—a test distinctly shaped by the contemporary Chinese context—would not come from the soil itself, but from baseless rumours conjured out of thin air by Baidu’s AI.
I rarely bring my mobile to Wicked Men’s Valley; I deeply cherish the feeling of being wholly present with the earth. Whether in the peanut patches or the rice paddies and vegetable beds, the span between sowing and reaping involves countless rounds of weeding, fertilising, and field maintenance. Each crop demands its own care, brings its own unforeseen troubles, and offers its own unique sustenance. Yes, I mean sustenance. To live among the fields and labour alongside the earth is profoundly rewarding in itself; it is a process that nourishes the soul. Idling away in a hammock, lost in thought, or casually leafing through a paper book is likewise nourishing. Scrolling through a screen is not.
I find it unbearable to live with body and mind tethered to a device. It often seems impossible to tell whether the person is using the phone, or the phone is using the person. I keep mobiles out of the fields and out of the bedroom. After my mother passed away, I even contemplated going completely off the grid—truly severing social ties and ceasing visitors—since there remains no reason in this world for anyone to need to reach me at a moment’s notice.
Setting aside my phone does not mean I am truly cutting myself off from the world, the internet, or the modern age. I can still sit at a computer to write articles for Foodthink, and I maintain my own WeChat Official Account, surfacing occasionally to share a thought. To maintain a measured connection with the world whilst ‘keeping the door shut to visitors’, and to define my own relationship with it, is to reclaim agency from a life dictated by external pressures and digital networks. It is about taking back control, answering to oneself, embracing the sun, tending the soil, and finding purpose in every vegetable and meal—simply living life firsthand.
For further details and updates on the author’s AI lawsuit with Baidu, please follow Kouzhi’s personal WeChat Official Account, “Shut Doors, Open Sky”.
Unless otherwise stated, all images in this article are provided by the author.
Editor: Xiaodan