放牛班的春天

一 | 据路透社北京时间1月10日报道，今年许多汽车在CES上展出。当你看到他们的中央控制显示屏时，你认为你已经进入电影院。”这不是科幻小说！”电动汽车创业公司拜顿（Baiton）的董事长兼首席执行官卡斯滕•布莱特菲尔德（Carsten Breitfeld）在拉斯维加斯的CES展台上表示，他指的是该公司M字节内部令人惊叹的48英寸（1.22米）显示屏。

二 |     

    Chen Aijun works in an optical shop in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Aug. 14, 2026. (Xinhua/Lu Youyi)The video came with almost no instructions.
There was no narration explaining the mythology behind palaces rising above an ocean of clouds in the video, nor subtitles identifying the heavenly gates, cranes or tiny figures moving beneath them.
Yet viewers outside China quickly began naming the world for themselves.
Some called it "paradise." Others saw a "Celestial Palace" or an "Immortal Realm" familiar from Chinese fantasy games and television dramas. One user wrote, "Waiting on Wukong to show up," invoking the Monkey King from the Chinese literary classic "Journey to the West," or the hit game "Black Myth: Wukong."
The interpretations differed, but viewers did not seem to need the same cultural knowledge to enter the conversation.
Earlier this month, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning shared the 33-second AI-generated video on social media with a question: "What does the Chinese heaven look like?"
It opened up a hermeneutic discussion, with responses overseas suggesting a cultural image does not necessarily need to elicit exactly the same interpretation for everyone in order for it to be viewed meaningfully.
"The right to interpret ultimately lies with the audience," said Zhang Zheng, deputy dean of Tsinghua University's School of Journalism and Communication.
People encountering unfamiliar cultures inevitably draw on what they already know, Zhang said. Rather than fully grasping every cultural reference, what matters is whether audiences can encounter the work, understand it and respond to it emotionally.
Before strangers abroad could interpret this particular world, however, it first had to get out of one man's head.
Chen Aijun, 34, is an optometrist in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province.
By day, Chen leads a quiet, down-to-earth life in a neighborhood optical shop. Inside, he worked among eyeglass frames and optometry equipment. On his computer was another landscape entirely: cloud seas, immense palaces, flying cranes and figures in ancient robes.
Chen's heaven did not come from any single ancient text.
Growing up in the 1990s, he watched "Journey to the West" and later encountered "The Investiture of the Gods," xianxia (immortal heroes) novels and fantasy games. Those stories mixed over time with images of Chinese architecture and landscapes he saw online.
He has never visited nearby Mount Emei, and most of what he knows of Mount Huangshan's famous sea of clouds comes from videos.
What appeared on his screen was therefore not a reconstruction of one fixed mythological scene, but a world shaped by traditional stories already filtered through television, novels, games, the internet and his own memory.
For years, Chen had no way to make that world visible.
He never studied painting, design, photography or 3D modeling. After high school, he joined his parents' optical business and eventually took over the shop.
Generative AI changed the gap between imagining an image and possessing the technical skills to show it to someone else.
More than a year ago, Chen began teaching himself through free online tutorials. In September 2025, he started regularly posting AI videos, and a month later began experimenting with palaces floating above clouds. He has since published more than 200 videos.
The process, however, involves far more than entering a few prompts. The technology lowered the technical threshold, but it did not make the choices for him.
When creating Nantianmen, the mythical heavenly gate, Chen first defines the spatial rhythm and tonal hierarchy, pairing towering architecture and cloud seas with deliberately miniature figures to amplify the celestial realm's grand scale.
If the result does not match the picture in his mind, he tries again. He often generates over 1,000 images a day, revising a single scene repeatedly before moving on to animation, editing, color grading and music.
The machine can generate a thousand possible heavens. Chen still has to decide which one is his.
"AI-produced images can be soulless, and it takes human inspiration and aesthetic sensibility to endow works with warmth and vitality," he said.
Zhang believes Chen's experience reflects a broader shift brought about by generative AI. He said AI is giving people without conventional artistic training access to forms of expression that once required specialized skills. But what they create still depends on what they bring to the tool.
"A person's existing knowledge inevitably shapes how they use AI," Zhang said.
Chen brought his memories to the machine. Viewers abroad, in turn, brought theirs to the image.
"Everyone brings their own associations to these scenes," he said.
If his imagined world had to be reduced to three elements, he would keep clouds, architecture and people. The first two should feel immense, he said, while the last should remain small.
The details are culturally specific, but the visual effect is more immediate: tiny human figures dwarfed by vast clouds and monumental architecture. The responses suggest that viewers did not need to understand every cultural reference to find a way into the image.
Chen has no overseas social media accounts and learned that the video was attracting attention abroad only when friends sent him screenshots.
His life at the optical shop has changed little. He still checks eyesight and fits glasses when customers come in, then returns to his computer when the shop grows quiet.
He now hopes to make longer AI videos with fuller stories. He also wants to visit Mount Emei and, one day, Mount Huangshan.
For years, images of distant mountains and clouds reached Chen through screens. His imagined landscapes later traveled through screens to people he had never met.
Now he wants to see the real mountains and clouds for himself.
    Chen Aijun makes AI videos in an optical shop in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Aug. 14, 2026. (Xinhua/Lu Youyi)
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三 | 巴顿的M-byte直到今年晚些时候才会批量生产，但其由中国面板制造商北京东方提供的超大显示屏证明，随着越来越多的网络化汽车的兴起，汽车行业有一个毋庸置疑的趋势。”屏幕是数字世界的窗口，”梅赛德斯-奔驰母公司戴姆勒（Daimler）首席设计师戈登瓦格纳（GordenWagener）表示。屏幕是新的马力。”2019年梅赛德斯eqc跨境汽车在同一个玻璃面板下有两个10.25英寸的显示屏，彼此独立。

四 | 不仅未来的电动汽车和豪华汽车将增加中央控制屏幕的尺寸，而且克莱斯勒2019年的RAM1500卡车在仪表板上也有12英寸的垂直显示。

五 | 除了中央控制台外，配有驾驶控制装置和后娱乐显示屏的仪表组的尺寸也在增加。

六 | 奥迪等汽车制造商将中央控制台与仪表板结合在一起，这需要像拜仁这样的大屏幕和更大的计算能力。

七 | 汽车制造商也在增加后视镜显示屏，以显示后视镜摄像头拍摄的照片。同时，“平视显示器”（在挡风玻璃上投射图像以帮助驾驶员更好地了解路况）也显示出爆炸性增长。

八 | “我们生活在一个以展示为中心的世界里，”IHS Markit汽车研究主管BrianRhodes说。我认为这不是巧合。我们的车上有很多类似平板电脑的显示器。这显然是总体趋势。

九 | ”根据IHS Markit，2018年全球汽车中央显示屏的平均尺寸为7.7英寸，预计到2024年将增至8.4英寸。

十 | 罗德兹说，平视显示器是增长最快的部分。他说，目前全世界大约有630万辆汽车配备了这种显示器，但预计到2024年，这个数字将飙升至1410万辆。笨拙的用户体验？特斯拉是第一家用大屏幕竞争对手的公司。2012年，S型配备了17英寸液晶显示屏。苹果和谷歌随后推出了Carplay和Android Auto，允许驾驶员通过汽车的中央控制屏幕播放流媒体音乐、显示地图和其他应用程序。罗德兹说，这些公司的努力是汽车制造商采用更大屏幕的主要原因。但苹果和谷歌在主要汽车显示屏上的出现也引起了汽车制造商的反思，他们不愿意为技术竞争对手提供如此有价值的平台，但渴望为消费者带来iPhone所需的体验。Gartner汽车研究主管MikeRamsey表示，目前的紧张局势依然存在。一些汽车制造商一直被动地整合苹果或谷歌的技术，往往导致糟糕的用户体验。拉姆齐说，在某些情况下，他们增加了屏幕，对用户没有任何真正的好处。10月，美国权威杂志《消费者报告》取消了对菲亚特-克莱斯勒、福特和本田车型的推荐，原因是消费者在死屏幕或空白屏幕上的反馈。尽管这些问题源于驱动内容的后端技术，而不是屏幕本身，但罗德说，“这对消费者来说是一样的。”清晰是汽车制造商说，如果处理得当，大型显示器可以通过提供更多信息来提高汽车安全性的关键，例如信号灯即将变红。他们说，随着屏幕越来越大，驾驶员的注意力将减少，而不是增加，因为驾驶员将不再需要在小屏幕上与大量选项作斗争。”“你需要一个地方，以一种有效且不分散注意力的方式直观地向司机显示信息，”拜顿数字技术副总裁陈泰宇说。福特用户体验部负责人鲁思·范恩（Ruth Vann）本月表示，为2020年福特探索者（Ford Explorer）设计的可选10英寸和标准8英寸显示器旨在防止驾驶员因信息重叠而沉浸在过多的数据中。”我们在驾驶时锁定某些功能，并鼓励驾驶员使用语音命令，”她说。