Seeking solitude in the countryside, only to be sentenced to ten years by AI rumours
Had I been ravenous for knowledge and eager to learn, perhaps I would have sought out a chat with an AI that knows everything under the sun. But the truth is, I have no such ambitions; my heart and eyes are fixed solely on my own little corner of “Villain’s Valley”. Living in seclusion, closing my doors to the world, I found no use for the myriad skills of artificial intelligence.
At the time, I considered myself a relic of the pre-AI era, believing that AI and I could exist in separate worlds without interfering with one another. While AI glided effortlessly through the skies of human intellect, I preferred to be truly alive, toiling in the fields along the country lanes. My primary task and greatest desire each day was simply to potter about in the soil—weeding, planting, harvesting vegetables, and picking melons. The sweat and hardship, and the sweetness of the harvest, had to be experienced by my own hands and tasted by my own tongue. This is something AI cannot do, and even if it could, I wouldn’t allow it: this is not just my work, it is my joy. Writing a short piece for Foodthink in my spare time is another irreplaceable physical sensation: every line, every paragraph is typed out by my own hand, with no part for AI to play.
But in the end, man proposes, God disposes. This year, the Year of the Snake, is my zodiac year. I had often heard that one’s zodiac year brings misfortune. Having said goodbye to my eighty-eight-year-old mother at the start of the year, I thought that was my greatest trial. I did not know that AI had an even greater calamity in store for me.
I. Baidu tells you to go to jail
Aside from overwintering wheat and rapeseed, peanuts are the earliest local Fujian crop to be harvested each year. Sown at the Spring Equinox and harvested during the Great Heat, the changes are visible to the naked eye every single day; the entire process is a joy.
The greatest joy, however, is the harvest. I have grown peanuts in Villain’s Valley every year. The first year was the worst—I didn’t even recover the seeds. Later, at my peak, I would harvest twenty or thirty jin of dried peanuts, barely enough to keep for seed, with just a few scraps to pick through and eat—hardly enough to fill the gaps in my teeth. In 2025, persistence finally paid off; by the time I was only halfway through the harvest, I had already surpassed a hundred jin of fresh peanuts. I can eat my fill and still have plenty left, hahahahaha…
It was the height of the Dog Days of summer, the third day of the Great Heat—the hottest period of the year. I had gone into the fields at six o’clock as soon as it dawned, hoping to finish the plot before lunch. By ten o’clock, the heat and thirst became unbearable, so I went back for water. While drinking, I happened to check my phone, and what I saw nearly made me choke. A message from a friend in Xi’an had travelled thousands of miles to reach me—I had been sentenced to ten years in prison by Baidu AI, on the morally stigmatising charge of “extortion”.
Baidu had pinned a completely unrelated crime on me, asserting emphatically that “Baidu AI has summarised 54 real-life experiences from across the web”. This rumour was fully annotated and formally formatted, even using courts and procuratorates as endorsements: “On 23 January 2025, the Putuo District People’s Procuratorate of Shanghai filed a public prosecution, and the court sentenced the individual to ten years and three months in prison for extortion”. The charge was clear and specific, the sentence precise to the month, and the books I had written, the charitable work I had done, and the public welfare organisation I had founded were all listed afterward, dragged along as evidence to be paraded before the public. It looked more real than reality itself.
I have lived my life in seclusion for so many years; whom have I ever offended?
II. The first case of reputation infringement by Baidu AI
This time, Baidu AI—acting as a custom-made bucket of filth—showed me that I was wrong. The rumour pointed to me with precision; if I ignored it, I would be defined by the lie and lose my innocence; if I fought it in court, I would be held hostage by the lie and lose my life.
From that sun-drenched noon when my world was turned upside down, my life was hijacked by Baidu.
I sued Baidu AI for reputation infringement, and the case was heard at the Beijing Internet Court on 11 December 2025. This was the first case of AI reputation infringement with publicly available records in China. I was not the only human harmed by AI; since then, more and more such cases have made their way to court.
On that very same day, Robin Li appeared in the American magazine *TIME*. The magazine named eight “Architects of AI” as its 2025 Persons of the Year: Meta’s Zuckerberg, AMD’s Lisa Su, xAI‘s Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Altman, DeepMind‘s Hassabis, Anthropic’s Amodei, and Stanford scientist Fei-Fei Li. Consequently, Robin Li was interviewed by *TIME* alongside Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank. That two such groundbreaking events concerning AI happened simultaneously was pure coincidence.
Baidu refused mediation, wanting to turn this into a landmark test case. In court, Baidu argued that my pursuit of accountability “harmed technological innovation”, claiming that they “represented not only Baidu, but the entire industry” and demanding that I show the “tolerance expected of a public figure”.
In court, Baidu was composed and effortless, while I was scrambling and struggling. Outside the court, my life had been defined by Baidu AI, slandered as an extortionist who had spent ten years in prison. I was forced to spend my precious time on Baidu AI, studying how to understand and counter the bizarre arguments and absurd logic of Baidu’s lawyers from a legal and technical perspective—in the end, I had been “AI-ed”.
III. A Finite Life, Infinite AI
Those days of going a day without touching a phone or a week without going online are gone forever. Who understands the harm that constant vigilance over a smartphone brings?
I have been “passively AI-ed” not only by the rumours generated by Baidu’s AI, but also “AI-fied” by the subsequent litigation, becoming a heavy user of Baidu AI. Baidu is a tech enterprise with formidable technical barriers, a sophisticated legal team, and extensive experience in litigation. To tackle these professional and legal hurdles, I had no choice but to use Baidu AI to use their own spear to pierce their own shield.
In the process of engaging with and using AI, I truly felt its “omniscience and omnipotence”; one cannot help but be impressed. AI has not only harmed me, it has also helped me.
Through this experience, I developed a physical sensation: it truly feels as though the internet, having entered the era of artificial intelligence, has acquired a kind of “vitality”. When this vitality turns malicious, it is a sinister demon in black, dragging people into a bottomless abyss. Even if we set that aside and view AI as a neutral tool—even as a helper in exposing lies—it possesses a suction-cup-like invasiveness toward a person’s time, energy, and autonomy. One can easily sink into it, becoming intoxicated.
Some may enjoy this feeling and crave interaction with AI, but after sinking into it, I experienced distinct physical discomfort. Although I felt intoxicated, stirred, and excited at the time, it was inevitably followed by a lingering sense of loss once the passion faded. I prefer a state of greater autonomy. Even though AI has become a common tool for me, I still prefer to maintain a greater distance from artificial intelligence.
As long as power and computing capacity are constant, AI is vast, infinite, and tireless; whereas I, as a concrete individual, am finite—finite in time and energy, finite in focus and life’s purpose. Therefore, I must control my use of AI, rather than be used by it.
IV. Who is the Master, Who is the Guest?
Counting back eight years from the trial date, on 11 December 2017, something happened. The world remained undisturbed, but it was pivotal for me. With a few simple belongings, I moved into a farmhouse in Shengou Village, Yilan, Taiwan, and began my life as a farmer.
Shengou is known as “Taiwan’s first organic farming village”. I was a popular brewmaster in the village, as well as a somewhat well-known teacher of lifestyle courses. I wrote two books on the pleasures of eating and drinking, and made countless friends through those same pleasures.
Two years later, I left Taiwan. I wanted to return and use my own two hands to build a self-sufficient, one-person farm—to close my doors and face the heavens.
Organic farming in Taiwan, much like its industrialisation, was twenty years ahead of us across the Strait. Consequently, issues regarding urban-rural structures and widespread health problems also emerged sooner, and the efforts and experiments of enlightened people began earlier as well.
After the Industrial Revolution, humanity marched forward with confidence, bidding farewell to the pastoral to enter a new era. Our lives became more colourful, yet we drifted further from the land. Every nation reaches a peak in average life expectancy during industrialisation and modernisation, which is also the “peak of modern diseases”. Then, problems such as ageing societies and the hollowing out of the countryside emerge. Only then do people begin to turn their gaze back toward the villages, the pastoral, and the path from which humanity first came.
Tao Yuanming wrote of returning home, only to find the garden growing wild. Today, however, the problem facing modern people born in cities, like me, is the “absence” of the pastoral. As humanity entered the internet age, over ninety per cent of the fellow farmers I knew in Shengou were such “city people”—they had no farming experience and no land of their own. What happens when this generation attempts to return to the earth?
By 2025, Villains’ Valley had achieved a basic level of self-sufficiency, with a full food-chain self-reliance excluding only salt. In the four years I have spent at Villains’ Valley, artificial intelligence has exploded, and the world has entered the AI era; meanwhile, I have stepped back, one pace at a time, into the agricultural age.
Returning home, I cease my friendships and end my travels. “Farming and daydreaming, closing the door to decline guests”—this is the sign hanging at the entrance of Villains’ Valley. I intend to close my doors and face the heavens, supporting myself through labour. While supporting systems are certainly important, the most vital elements will always be the soil, the sun, and the water. With these, I do not fear starting from zero. While striving alone is certainly difficult, it simply means it will take a little longer.
I have given myself fifteen years. I hope that by the age of seventy, I can complete my ideal home, including water and electricity self-sufficiency—where I have whatever I wish to eat, have completed comprehensive soil improvement, implemented full no-till farming, and established a food forest across the entire area to enter a state of permanence.
Yet, I never imagined that the most severe trial with “Chinese characteristics” I would encounter on this land would not come from the soil, but from the rumours flown in from the heavens by Baidu AI.
In Villains’ Valley, I usually do not carry a phone; I thoroughly enjoy the feeling of interacting wholeheartedly with the land. Whether it is the peanut fields, the paddy fields, or the vegetable patches, between every sowing and harvest, there are countless hours of weeding, fertilising, and field management. Every crop has its own needs, its own unexpected troubles, and its own unique nourishment. Yes, I said it correctly: nourishment. To be in the pastoral, communing with the earth, is inherently rewarding; it is a process that nourishes the soul. Idling in a hammock or aimlessly flipping through a paper book is also a form of nourishment, but scrolling through a phone is not.
I cannot endure a life where the body and mind are tethered to a phone; it is unclear whether the person is using the phone, or the phone is using the person. I prefer that the phone does not enter the fields or the bedroom. After my mother passed away, I even thought about cutting off my phone entirely—to truly cease all social ties and travels, for there was no longer any reason for anyone to need to find me at any moment.
Cutting off the phone is not a true severance from the world, the network, or the era. I can still use a computer to write for Foodthink, and I have my own WeChat public account where I pop up occasionally. To be able to maintain a limited connection with the world while “closing the door to guests”—to autonomously define my relationship with the world—is, in fact, to reclaim agency from a life controlled by the outside world and the network. It is to be the master of oneself, to embrace the sun, to be close to the earth, to cherish every simple meal, and to live firsthand.
For more details and updates on the author’s AI lawsuit with Baidu, please follow the personal public account “Closing the Door to Face the Heavens”
Unless otherwise stated, all images in this article were provided by the author
Editor: Xiao Dan