Here is how it happened:

The interaction itself lasted about five minutes, and the model worked for roughly ten minutes, using Astra at the light reasoning level. The cost was about 43% of the five-hour allowance on a Plus subscription.

The topic occurred to me more or less by chance. I had tested similar kinds of LLM-assisted writing before; I simply wanted to see what roughly a year of model iteration and improvement had produced. During the interaction, the only genuinely effective prompts were the fifth and sixth. The earlier prompts were mostly my attempt to imitate the behavior of an ordinary user so that the process would feel a little more “natural.” Of course, consciously or not, I may also have been quietly constraining and steering the boundaries and direction of its reasoning.

My own conclusion:

The generation speed is frightening, but the writing is nowhere near perfect—in fact, it is not even really competent—because this is the model’s “open” and “free” output under extremely limited prompting (although a few of the analytical paths that emerged during the interaction were genuinely interesting). Judged by conventional standards of academic writing, countless passages are stiff and hasty. Most sections are merely beginnings and cannot be said to have completed a closed argumentative loop. The ending in particular is little more than a pile of scattered fragments, without a properly developed logical progression or structure. Even in some of the relatively complete passages, the prose repeatedly slips into the role of a “respondent” defending a position against an interlocutor who does not exist in the written article at all, but only existed during the interactive exchange, where repeated follow-up questions forced the model to keep explaining and defending its claims. This gives the prose a strongly “defensive” quality and deprives it of a more proactive, logical, structured, and persuasive mode of exposition. Yet I suspect most of these exposed weaknesses could be substantially improved through further interaction—for example, by specifying the detailed logic more tightly and narrowing a discussion until it can produce a defensible interim conclusion; by expanding the theoretical tools in a manner more consistent with academic convention, so that the article carries greater theoretical weight; or by introducing the familiar question-and-answer device into the deductive reasoning process, which would make the argument flow more smoothly and noticeably improve the prose. Even without using an LLM, I think one or two evenings of manual revision within the current overall framework would probably be enough.

Around this time last year, during a discussion with students, I made a very crude prediction: for papers in the humanities, social sciences, and arts, the value of the prose itself would eventually approach zero. Today that judgment still looks crude and dogmatic, but some of what has happened in the meantime seems to keep adding positive evidence for that “conclusion.” Anyone with solid academic training can immediately see where today’s output is weak and where its hard flaws lie. But based on what I know of this particular academic subfield, and on my own limited social contact within it, I am quite sure there are people who would misjudge the value of an output “article” like this.

I also remember making an even cruder deduction at the time: if we extrapolate from the current rate at which model output efficiency and quality are improving, an academic evaluation system centered on journal articles and monographs may collapse surprisingly soon.

I would actually very much like to see that day arrive.

What would that mean for people currently struggling through the sea of academia, trying desperately to reach shore? And what, if anything, can they do? Get ahead of everyone else and use the efficiency of LLMs to cash in before the building starts to fall? Or…? The second direction is too open-ended, and for the moment I do not have an answer.

What follows is the complete interaction and generated text, translated without altering its content or structure.

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Interaction:

Original Record of the Niu Lai Discussion

Archival note (not part of the original conversation): This file preserves, in chronological order, all user messages, assistant replies, and user-facing progress notes shown before retrieval within this topic, up to the message in which the user requested the creation of two Markdown files. Apart from adding role and turn headings, the wording, punctuation, links, judgments, and changes of position in the original text have not been corrected. Tool calls, tool outputs, and system information not visible to the user are not part of the conversation body and are therefore omitted. Here, “all previous discussion” refers to the complete visible discussion of the current Niu Lai topic beginning with the first question; it does not include other conversations or historical material supplied only in summary form, nor are summaries reconstructed as if they were original text. The current document-production process falls outside the archival cutoff.

Turn 1 | User

I’d like to analyze and evaluate Niu Lai from the perspective of decoupling the discourse level from the story level. Could you combine current articles and audience reactions online and suggest some viable analytical directions?

Turn 1 | Assistant

Which work do you mean by “Niu”? Do you mean the film Cow (Dou Niu), another work titled Niu, or did a character get omitted while you were typing? Just give me the full title, the director, or a link.

Once that is clear, I’ll combine online criticism and audience feedback and break the analysis into three parts:

• Story level: what actually happens. Reconstruct the chronological sequence of events and examine whether character motivation, causality, conflict, and resolution hold together.
• Discourse level: how the work lets us know what happens. Analyze point of view, the withholding and disclosure of information, temporal rearrangement, pacing, and how image and sound shape audience judgment.
• The relationship between the two: what the telling adds to the story. Distinguish effects that come from the story itself from those created by the organization of discourse, and then ask whether form deepens character and theme or instead conceals weaknesses in causality or characterization.

Audience reactions can be disaggregated in the same way: responses such as “I couldn’t understand it,” “it was stunning,” “it was pretentious,” or “it moved me” may correspond to different levels, and disagreements may arise either from the work itself or from audience expectations.

Turn 2 | User

Niu Lai

Turn 2 | Assistant Progress Note

I’ll first check basic information and relevant commentary on Niu Lai, confirm the specific text under discussion, and then map out an analytical path based on decoupling the “story level” from the “discourse level.”

Turn 2 | Assistant

Understood—you mean the animated film Niu Lai. After reviewing relevant criticism, reporting, and audience feedback, I think your proposed angle is quite productive: the film is well suited to a discussion of why the emotional force of a story, the degree of accomplishment in its discourse, and the audience’s actual experience may diverge from one another.

But “decoupling” should be an analytical step. In the end, we still need to examine how the two levels affect each other. The following are hypotheses grounded in public material and designed to be testable; I am not pretending to have conducted a shot-by-shot viewing of the entire film. Spoilers follow.

First, define the objects of analysis clearly.

One point needs particular attention: modeling and rendering belong to production and audiovisual presentation and should not simply be equated with discourse. A model can be crude while character action, shot relations, and information transmission remain clear; the reverse is also possible.

The available material already shows different evaluative objects being conflated. Some audience members interviewed by The Beijing News acknowledged that the production was rough but said collective viewing was enjoyable; a Yunnan Daily response emphasized growth and familial affection; Li Zhaoxing treated the slow pacing and declamatory dialogue as an entry point into the film’s distinctive style. These views are not necessarily in direct conflict, because they are evaluating different things. The Beijing News audience interviews, Yunnan Daily response, Li Zhaoxing review

I would suggest developing the analysis along five main lines.

1. If you strip away the images and voices, how much value remains in the story itself?

According to public plot summaries, the basic structure is this: a weak calf cannot stand; in a dream it experiences friendship, group rejection, migration, and loss; finally it wakes up and stands. That provides a coming-of-age framework of “dependence—frustration—responsibility.” Plot summary

But “having a complete growth framework” and “developing growth convincingly” are two different things. The key questions include:

• Does Niu Lai change because of choices it makes, rather than simply because others repeatedly rescue it?
• Does each earlier experience alter how it acts the next time?
• Do the mother and friends have desires and personalities of their own, or do they mainly function to protect, sacrifice for, and educate the protagonist?

The most practical method is to write a value-neutral synopsis, deleting evaluative words such as “brave,” “sincere,” and “moving,” and retaining only who does what, why they do it, and what consequences follow.

If gradual character change remains visible after doing that, then the story level has independent support. If what remains is merely a series of dangers and rescues, the film may possess emotionally effective subject matter without having fully developed its characters.

That allows for a stronger claim: the value of Niu Lai’s story should be demonstrated through the connections among character actions; it cannot simply be guaranteed by themes such as maternal love and growing up.

2. Does the revelation that “it was all a dream” complete the growth arc, or cancel it?

This is perhaps the best entry point for the “decoupling” you have in mind.

The following need to be considered separately:

• Story level: What psychological relationship connects Niu Lai’s dreaming, waking, and standing up?
• Discourse level: When does the audience learn that these experiences belong to a dream, and what cues did the film provide beforehand?
• Emotional result: Does the ending give the earlier losses a new meaning, or does it make the audience feel that its previous emotional investment has been revoked?

One plausible interpretation is that the dream allows Niu Lai to rehearse separation, danger, and responsibility, eventually giving it the courage to face reality. Another possibility is that the film uses the dream to stage a great deal of suffering and then uses waking up to exempt that suffering from consequences.

The key distinction is whether a recognizable change remains after the dream ends, rather than merely the physical fact that the calf can finally stand.

The Yunnan Daily article interprets the dream as an imaginative structure of growth and goes on to use it to explain the absurdity and roughness of the imagery. The former interpretation is worth testing; the latter requires caution. A dream can depart from everyday realism, but it does not automatically turn every expressive defect into artistic meaning. Related commentary

A useful counterfactual question would be: if the opening explicitly told viewers that “what follows is a dream,” would the film retain most of its emotional force? This helps distinguish whether the film relies on the process of growth or on the information reversal at the end.

3. Can a breakdown in discourse accidentally create another kind of viewing value?

Li Zhaoxing argues that the film departs from mainstream viewing habits especially in pacing and dialogue: actions are slow, and the language has a recital-like quality. He also suggests that this mode of expression may preserve the creators’ generational cultural experience. That is a critic’s interpretation; it can serve as a research hypothesis rather than as a confirmed creative intention. Li Zhaoxing review

The most interesting issue here is that three stages may fail to align:

The emotion the film tries to express → the emotion its audiovisual form actually conveys → the experience the audience ultimately has.

For example, a scene intended to be solemn and lyrical may be perceived as comic because of the combination of pauses, intonation, and movement. The audience may genuinely enjoy itself, but that enjoyment does not necessarily prove that the original lyrical expression succeeded.

At particular screenings reported by The Beijing News, there was sustained laughter, and some viewers described the film as “rough but fun to watch.” This is an observation about specific screenings, not evidence that all viewers reacted the same way. On-site report

We can therefore acknowledge both of the following at once:

• Some passages fail to achieve their intended emotional aim.
• Those same passages produce distinctive, perhaps even worthwhile, unintended effects.

An unintended effect can have aesthetic value, but that does not prove retroactively that the creator had mastered the production of that effect. This is more explanatory than simply calling the film either “trash” or “avant-garde art.”

4. Where does the so-called “sincerity” come from: the story, the expression, or the creators’ biography?

This is where online commentary most easily collapses different things together. “Sincerity” can be separated into several possible sources:

The three may reinforce each other, but they cannot substitute for one another.

A useful thought experiment is: if you knew nothing about the mother-and-son production story, in which specific scenes would you still feel sincerity, and on what basis?

If you can point to lived details in the dialogue or to the way characters show care, then sincerity has entered the work itself. If the main reasons are “they worked on it for years” or “only two people made it,” then the object of evaluation is more the creators’ effort.

That does not deny the value of the effort. It simply makes the evaluation more precise: we can respect creative labor while independently judging whether it has been transformed into effective expression.

5. Does the film depict a child’s growth, or an adult’s idea of how a child should grow?

This is a deeper question with more potential than whether the images look good.

Scene by scene, you can record: who knows the right answer, who explains the world, who acts, and who bears the cost.

If adult characters consistently explain, protect, and sacrifice, while the child grows mainly through losing its protectors, further questions follow:

• Is growth defined as understanding and inheriting adult instruction?
• Must kindness be proved through repeated sacrifice?
• Does the child ever get the chance to form a judgment different from that of its protectors?
• Does eventual acceptance by the group become the main criterion of growth?

These should all remain questions to be tested rather than conclusions drawn from a synopsis alone. But they move the discussion beyond “maternal love is touching” toward what kind of parent-child relationship and ethics of growth the film actually affirms.

If you plan to write an analysis, I would most strongly recommend using the dream structure as the main axis and then developing the misalignment between discourse effects and audience response around it. That allows for close reading of the film while also explaining why online responses have been so divided.

When actually watching the film, you only need to record four things:

Based on the current material, a reasonably cautious preliminary judgment would be: Niu Lai has a recognizable coming-of-age story framework, but the emotional potential of that framework, the extent to which the discourse realizes it, and the additional pleasures audiences derive from it must be argued separately. What is genuinely worth writing about is precisely why those three do not fully coincide.

Turn 3 | User

Let me clarify the premise of the discussion. Within a narratological framework, the production-related elements we just mentioned should all fall under the category of the discourse level. Why did that become blurred in the previous answer?

Turn 3 | Assistant

Yes. Within the binary “story level—discourse level” framework you have defined, modeling, animation, voice acting, editing, visual texture, and so on should all be classified under the discourse level insofar as we are discussing their manifestation and function in the finished film. I previously peeled production and audiovisual presentation partly away from discourse, which created an inconsistency in the conceptual framework.

The confusion came mainly from my mixing two meanings of “discourse”:

• Discourse in the broad sense: every means by which the story is presented, including medium, image, sound, performance, temporal organization, and distribution of information. This is the framework you proposed.
• Narrative technique in a narrower sense: plot arrangement, point of view, suspense, pacing, and the presentation of causal information. When I said something like “the production is crude but the narration is clear,” I had silently shifted to this narrower sense.

As a result, I described what should have been a distinction among dimensions within the discourse level as if it were a distinction between production and discourse. For example:

“The modeling is crude, but character action and information transmission are clear.”

That statement can be valid, but what it means is: within the discourse level, visual modeling is weak, while the organization of action and transmission of information are relatively effective. It does not show that modeling lies outside discourse. My earlier statement that “modeling and rendering cannot simply be equated with discourse” was therefore misleading in this context and should be corrected.

The only boundary worth preserving is the distinction between the production process and expression in the finished film:

So the problem was not that your classification was inadequate. The problem was that I failed to keep the level of classification consistent and mistakenly turned “one subdimension of discourse is not identical with discourse as a whole” into “this subdimension does not belong to discourse.”

The subsequent analysis of Niu Lai should therefore adhere strictly to your terminology: the story level examines “what is told,” while the discourse level examines “how what is told becomes a perceptible film.” Rough production, unusual voice acting, and slow pacing should all first be treated as specific features of the discourse level, and only then should we ask how they affect the transmission and realization of the story’s value.

Turn 4 | User

Good. Now that we have clarified that point, take the phenomena surrounding the film’s circulation and the discussions derived from them and analyze them further.

Turn 4 | Assistant Progress Note

I’ll keep using this binary framework and look more closely at how, in circulation, audiences move from mocking the discourse form to evaluating the story, the creators, and the act of participating in the circulation itself.

Turn 4 | Assistant

Once that premise is clear, the circulation of Niu Lai can be described more precisely with the following central claim: in circulation, its discourse form has been extracted from the original story and turned into an independent object of viewing; audiences then build new stories around those forms—stories about the creators, the film industry, and the audience itself.

These “new stories” are external narratives that form around the film; they are not a third internal level added to the film. What follows will distinguish the phenomena reported in public sources from the interpretations I draw from them.

1. Why could the initial wave of circulation almost bypass the story level?

The Paper’s account of the film’s circulation notes that clips, voice-imitation videos, and remixed posters were major components of its spread, to the point that variants such as Goose Lai and Cat Lai appeared. This kind of circulation does not require audiences to know Niu Lai’s full story. The Paper report

Within our framework, the difference looks like this:

What likely dominated the initial spread, then, were formal features capable of retaining their effect even after being detached from the story.

This creates an important distortion: viewers can become highly familiar with Niu Lai’s discourse style while barely encountering its story, and then form a judgment about the entire work. “This movie is bad” may in fact demonstrate only that “these formal features do not match my expectations.”

But the reverse conclusion—that critics are “only looking at the surface”—would also be wrong. The discourse level is part of the work. Dislike of its visual design, sound, or pacing is a legitimate aesthetic judgment. What must be constrained is the unconditional expansion of a local judgment into a total judgment.

2. Why would someone think it “looks bad” and still buy a ticket—or even feel the ticket was worth the money?

On-site interviews by The Beijing News show precisely this combination: some viewers entered out of curiosity, acknowledged the roughness of the production, yet still described the viewing experience as enjoyable. The Beijing News report

What has changed here is the purpose of viewing.

Ordinarily, viewers enter the story through the discourse and become concerned with what the characters are going through. Some viewers of Niu Lai, by contrast, focus on “the fact that this thing has actually been represented in this way.” Before the character’s suffering becomes the center of attention, the sounds and movements used to represent that suffering have already become comic material.

The discourse forms originally used to convey the story become objects to be watched, compared, and laughed at.

The same passage can therefore produce two results at once:

• It may fail to achieve the intended effect of communicating a character’s sadness.
• It may succeed at generating an unintended comic experience.

There is no logical contradiction here. We simply need to specify separately which effect succeeded, for whom, and under what viewing conditions.

I should also revise one point from the previous round that risked overemphasizing authorial intention: an unintended effect does not necessarily lack artistic value. Whether the creator intended the effect, whether the effect reliably occurs, and whether the effect is aesthetically worthwhile are three different questions. What cannot be done is to infer backward from “the audience found it funny” to “the creator successfully made a comedy.”

3. “I went in laughing and ended up moved” does not necessarily mean the earlier judgment was overturned.

The Yunnan Daily response places more weight on growth and family affection and also mentions reports of children crying during screenings. This shows that emotional identification exists in public discussion, but it does not establish how widespread it is. Yunnan Daily article

At least three theoretical explanations are possible:

1. The story relations remain effective. Even if certain discourse choices break immersion, dependence, separation, protection, and loss may still generate emotional responses.
2. Effects within the discourse level are uneven. The visual modeling may be funny, while a particular use of sound, repetition, or scene arrangement genuinely conveys emotion.
3. Viewers begin connecting the film to the creators’ real-life experience. The object of emotion shifts partly from the characters to the creators outside the film.

These three explanations cannot be collapsed into the slogan “sincerity defeated technique.”

Especially within the broad definition of discourse we have already established, audiences cannot completely bypass discourse and gain direct access to a pure, unpresented story. So the statement “the discourse is worthless, but the story moved me” also needs correction. If character relationships are understood and loss is felt, then at least some part of the discourse successfully conveyed something—or viewers supplemented what was missing with prior experience.

The real analytical question is: where exactly does the emotion occur, and what information and forms trigger it? Tears alone do not prove that the entire film is excellent, just as laughter does not prove that it contains no emotional force.

4. “A sincere bad movie”: why is the phrase appealing, and why does it so easily stop thought?

“Sincerity” allows two apparently conflicting judgments to coexist: the expression is clumsy, yet the act of creation deserves respect. The problem is that the phrase often fails to specify where that respect comes from.

Li Zhaoxing’s review discusses the film’s handmade quality while also reading its style in light of the mother-and-son production background. Li Zhaoxing review

From this, we can propose a mechanism of circulation: the same formal feature may be reinterpreted once the audience gains different background knowledge.

Without knowing the production background:

Stiff movement, strange voices → lack of skill, low completion.

After learning the production background:

Stiff movement, strange voices → traces of personal labor, expression that has not been professionally smoothed away.

The form has not changed; the meaning assigned to the form has. This change is not necessarily just a “sympathy bonus.” Individuality, distinctive vocal texture, and lived experience may themselves become genuine aesthetic values. But two inferences still need separate evidence:

• “A particular person made this by hand” does not automatically mean “the expression is effective.”
• “The expression is not very skillful” does not automatically mean “there is no individuality here worth preserving.”

A more interesting research question is whether media coverage organizes the creators’ experience into a new coming-of-age story: limited resources, persistence in making the film, being mocked, and finally being seen. Once the audience becomes invested in this external story, buying a ticket may become an action that helps bring it toward a satisfying ending. At that point, what ticket sales support is no longer entirely the story on the screen.

5. Why do five-star ratings, negative reviews, and box office performance lose their usual alignment?

In an analysis of review samples published on August 18, The Paper noted a large amount of irony among the five-star short reviews it collected. This is an analysis of a specific sample at a specific moment and cannot be treated as the opinion distribution of all viewers. But it is enough to show that star ratings cannot be read independently of the semantic content of the reviews. Review-sample analysis

Several kinds of public behavior can be separated as follows:

This produces misalignment in many debates:

“Rising box office proves that everyone approves of it” equates purchase with aesthetic approval;
“Everyone says it is bad, so the audience got no value from it” equates artistic evaluation with the total value of the viewing experience.

In a circulation environment like Niu Lai’s, evaluation of the work and participation in the event can move in opposite directions: the more strongly someone rejects the film, the more actively that person may help circulate it.

6. Both “this is resistance to the film industry” and “this is a tragedy for the film industry” require additional argument.

Each claim organizes audience action into a larger story:

• The former casts viewers as people resisting polished emptiness and supporting personal expression.
• The latter casts viewers as people rewarding low standards and undermining professional norms.

But the fact that “someone bought a ticket to Niu Lai” does not by itself establish either motivation. Curiosity, sympathy, aesthetic interest, and social participation can coexist; nor can we assume that everyone is using the film to express a position on the industry.

Pan Liunong’s commentary makes a useful observation: even reverse consumption can be converted by platforms and theaters into traffic and revenue; mockery is not naturally outside the market. Related commentary

This lets us separate the issues further:

• At the level of interpretive authority, audiences really can rewrite the meaning of a film, turning originally serious expression into comic material.
• At the level of commercial relations, that rewriting may still drive ticket sales and circulation.
• At the level of industry consequences, whether it actually squeezes out stronger films or encourages imitation requires separate evidence about scheduling changes and subsequent production; it cannot be proved by one viral success.

Likewise, calling the circulation phenomenon “performance art” may be a vivid description, but it cannot directly serve as evidence for the artistic quality of the film itself. Even if audience participation constitutes a public event worth studying, we still need to distinguish how much of the event’s cultural significance should be attributed to the original film’s story and discourse, and how much comes from later participants.

The research proposition I find most explanatory is this:

The circulation of Niu Lai demonstrates the dual function of the discourse level: it may obstruct the audience’s entry into the original story, yet its very distinctiveness can also attract viewers and become material for new narratives.

For that reason, the film should not be evaluated simply by adding together “the story is okay” and “the discourse is poor.” What matters more is tracing how meaning changes: a particular tone of voice first conveys a character’s emotion, then becomes a joke, then is reinterpreted as a trace of the creator’s individuality, and finally becomes a symbol in support of or opposition to the film industry. The discourse feature itself remains unchanged across these stages, but the story it serves, the emotion it triggers, and the value judgment it carries have all changed.

Turn 5 | User

Good. Since we have reached this point, let me clarify the original question further. “Decoupling” is only an analogy here; I do not mean genuine decoupling in the engineering sense. There is also a layer of “deconstruction” behind it. In other words, the film deconstructs a long-established association or paradigm in filmmaking between traditional methods and techniques of representation and the artistic expression behind them. It is almost as if, within the existing aesthetic system and its causal assumptions, the dependencies between the two ends of the chain have been decoupled. Think more deeply from this angle and analyze it again.

Turn 5 | Assistant

I understand your point more precisely now: what you want to discuss is how Niu Lai makes the usually assumed chain “technical maturity → effective expression → artistic value” less stable. The distinction between story level and discourse level is a method for entering the problem; the real object of analysis is the set of relationships in film creation and evaluation that have become habitual, even naturalized as if they were laws.

My earlier analysis was still mainly classificatory: what belongs to story, what belongs to discourse, and what belongs to circulation. That helps avoid conceptual confusion, but it did not yet fully enter what you mean by “deconstruction”: should the hierarchy of values and causal relationships between these categories themselves also be subjected to scrutiny?

Following that direction, I think the argument can be pushed several steps further.

First, what is being destabilized is not the proposition that “film needs form,” but the interpretive authority of a particular set of formal norms over artistic efficacy.

A common evaluative logic—often implicit rather than explicitly stated—runs like this:

Only by mastering mature techniques can one express effectively; only effective expression can generate a valuable aesthetic experience.

Yet this chain contains demands of different kinds:

The three often reinforce each other, but they are not identical.

The challenge posed by Niu Lai is this: when the first item is clearly disputed while the latter two still occur for at least some viewers, we are forced to re-examine the practice of treating the first as a necessary condition for the latter two.

This is not simply a matter of saying “bad technique can still move people.” The deeper question is: among the things called technical failures, which genuinely restrict expression, and which merely depart from familiar modes of expression? If the two are not distinguished, “technical evaluation” can turn a historically formed convention into a universal entrance exam for artistic expression.

Film history, of course, already contains many breaks with established norms. The provisional distinctiveness of Niu Lai lies in the fact that this kind of deviation entered commercial theaters and was magnified through mass participation, compelling ordinary viewers who would not normally discuss these questions to participate in the judgment.

Second, it may turn discourse form from a “vehicle for meaning” into a “site where meaning happens.”

We often say that form should serve content. That formulation easily presupposes that meaning already exists and that the task of form is simply to transport it clearly and accurately to the audience.

But some of Niu Lai’s viewing effects may arise precisely where expression fails to proceed as expected.

For example, the juxtaposition of a solemn vocal tone with awkward movement may first make the audience laugh. As viewing continues, that awkwardness may then be felt as unpolished commitment, exposure of personal experience, or even a kind of vulnerability. Here, form does more than convey the original story; it makes viewers aware that “someone is trying to tell this story.”

The object of the viewer’s feeling expands from the represented life to the act of representation itself.

This is an interpretive hypothesis of mine; it does not imply that every viewer undergoes this shift. Li Zhaoxing’s discussion of the film’s declamatory language, slow pacing, and traces of personal expression offers an entry point for reading it in this direction. Li Zhaoxing review

From this angle, “expressive failure” and “the occurrence of art” can occupy the same place. A technique may fail to perform its intended function yet generate another kind of experience. If an older paradigm can register such a deviation only as a deduction in score, it cannot adequately describe what happened.

But we should not immediately translate every defect into a virtue. What needs to be distinguished is which defects are merely losses and which deviations actually alter the nature of the experience.

Third, it calls into question the premise that artistic expression must first be mastered by the author.

I repeatedly distinguished authorial intention from audience effect earlier, and that distinction remains necessary. But if we treat the author’s prior control over an effect as the ultimate criterion for artistic value, we simply rebuild the dependency you want to examine:

Only if the author knows exactly what they are doing can the audience’s resulting experience count as an artistic achievement of the work.

That standard is too strong.

At minimum, three judgments should be separated:

• Whether the author consciously designed a particular effect.
• Whether the work’s concrete form provides the conditions for that effect.
• Whether the effect has aesthetic value worth discussing.

Insufficiency in the first does not automatically invalidate the latter two. Contingency, limits of ability, and conditions of reception can all participate in the production of meaning.

Thus, “they never meant that; the audience is reading too much into it” cannot automatically end the analysis. At most, it challenges a claim about authorial intention; it does not yet negate the experience the work actually produces.

Interpretation still needs constraints, however. It must be able to point to specific formal evidence and explain why this experience is triggered by this work rather than being something that could be projected onto anything. Relaxing the author’s control over meaning does not mean abandoning evidence for interpretation.

Fourth, deconstruction becomes most powerful when the old value oppositions begin to cross into one another internally.

Debate around Niu Lai often relies on several binaries:

This is closer to the “deconstruction” you have in mind than the statement “low technique can still produce high art.” The latter leaves the original scale intact and merely admits an exception; the former asks: might what was originally excluded to the negative side actually participate in producing positive value?

For example, if the individuality viewers perceive comes precisely from tones and movements that have not been professionally smoothed away, then clumsiness is no longer merely an obstacle tolerated “despite everything”; it may already be part of the experience itself.

At this point, a discriminating counterfactual question would be:

If the same story were completely remade with smoother animation and more standardized voice acting, in what ways would it improve—and what might it lose?

We cannot assume in advance that it would necessarily lose sincerity. But the question helps test whether what we value lies in the story content itself, or in what emerges when that story meets this particular mode of expression.

Fifth, circulation is not merely external noise that begins after a work is finished; it may alter the way the work is experienced.

On-site reporting about Niu Lai shows some viewers watching with curiosity-driven expectations and amid collective laughter; commentary has also noted audiences becoming interested in the reactions of other audience members. The Beijing News on-site report, Pan Liunong commentary

From this, a further inference follows: under such conditions, aesthetic experience cannot be explained solely by internal properties of the film.

The same line of dialogue enters different structures of attention when viewed alone, with children, or in a group waiting to recognize memes. The content on screen is the same, but what viewers are waiting for differs, and so do the relations they are able to perceive.

This means the old one-way chain—author produces expression, work stores meaning, audience receives meaning—needs to be rewritten as an interactive process. Expectations brought by the audience and feedback within the screening participate in determining which forms become salient, which emotions are suppressed, and which meanings are extended.

But a boundary still needs to be maintained: participating in the production of an aesthetic experience does not mean that everything participants do becomes an artistic achievement of the original film. We can evaluate both the finished film and the viewing event that forms around it. They are connected, but the entire value of the latter cannot be credited back to the former.

Sixth, none of this proves that technique is useless; it requires us to change how the value of technique is justified.

The value of traditional technique does not need to rest on the claim that “without me, art cannot happen.” Its value can instead lie in improving the precision of expression, expanding the range of experiences that can be realized, reducing unnecessary loss, and making certain effects occur more reliably.

Even if Niu Lai constitutes a meaningful counterexample, it can only weaken the strong proposition that “particular techniques are necessary conditions for artistic effects.” It cannot prove that technique and effect are unrelated, much less that roughness has a universal advantage.

We should also avoid simply reversing the old hierarchy: treating roughness as proof of sincerity and polish as proof of falseness. That merely flips the hierarchy while continuing to substitute formal labels for concrete analysis.

I would therefore condense your idea into the following research proposition:

The significance of Niu Lai may lie in the way it exposes the habitual binding together of professional completion, expressive efficacy, and artistic value. Deviations in its discourse, acting jointly with story comprehension, audience experience, and conditions of circulation, may generate forms of value that established evaluative norms cannot adequately explain.

The question most worth pursuing next is precisely what the phrase “a sincere bad movie” has not yet explained: are viewers generously tolerating a work that fails to express itself well, or are they genuinely experiencing a kind of expression that could only emerge through this particular clumsiness? Both possibilities may exist. But only by distinguishing them can the “deconstruction” you propose move from an elegant phrase to a substantive judgment about the film.

Turn 6 | User

Some of what you just wrote is useful. Building on it, consider another question. Film production, its forms and techniques, has become extremely mature today, and we have grown accustomed to many of the conventions that have formed around it—for example, the assumed causal link between more refined images and sound and better artistic expression. One reason is that this kind of production embodies enormous amounts of intellectual and physical labor; another is that it usually requires large-scale capital investment. Both factors create or reinforce a kind of natural scarcity, and that scarcity in turn further confers or establishes value on the work. But once AI tools enter the production and creative process, this earlier scarcity will inevitably diminish and may even disappear. From this angle, although the phenomenon produced by Niu Lai has nothing to do with that causal mechanism, can it nevertheless provide an observational window through which we can judge—or perhaps substantiate—the hypothesis above?

Turn 6 | Assistant

Yes. Niu Lai can serve as an illuminating observational window, but it is better suited to showing that “existing connections can be pulled apart” than to proving that “AI will necessarily invalidate all of those connections.” Its value is that the non-necessity of these relationships becomes visible even before AI has entered as the causal factor.

Your question pushes the discussion one step further. Previously, we were discussing the relationship between form and artistic expression. Now the question becomes: why have we come to believe this relationship so firmly? How much of that belief comes from aesthetic experience itself, and how much from the production cost and scarcity behind it?

There is indeed a mechanism here worth examining closely.

Refined form not only produces aesthetic effects; for a long time it has also functioned as proof of cost and capability.

A complex and precise animation, or a tightly coordinated system of image and sound, acts directly on the senses while indirectly telling the audience that there may be substantial labor, professional knowledge, organizational capacity, and financial investment behind it.

Refined form may therefore perform three functions at once in viewing:

Because these three functions have overlapped for so long, it becomes easy to treat them as if they were the same thing: to see refinement and expect better expression; to see large investment and expect that the work deserves serious attention.

That is not necessarily an entirely aesthetic mistake. Under production conditions in which refined form is genuinely difficult to obtain, it can function as a reasonable heuristic for screening works. But a “useful clue” can gradually harden into “value itself,” even becoming a threshold that determines whether a work is admitted into serious discussion.

What AI may destabilize first is precisely this signaling relationship.

Suppose certain kinds of polished imagery, fluid animation, or standardized sound become widely accessible. The same appearance would no longer reliably prove the same scale of labor, ability, and investment. The form may remain beautiful, but its evidentiary power as a scarce achievement declines.

That decline does not require the form itself to become worse.

Beautiful images may remain beautiful, yet viewers may no longer be astonished by them or take them, by themselves, as evidence that a work is important. What used to arrive bundled together—“sensory quality,” “difficulty of realization,” and “artistic value”—must increasingly be judged separately.

I would, however, qualify your phrase “scarcity will inevitably disappear” as follows: if AI substantially lowers the threshold for realizing mature forms, then the scarcity built on those thresholds will weaken. That does not mean all creative scarcity disappears. Sustaining control over a feature-length work, making meaningful choices, constructing a distinctive experience, and obtaining audience attention do not automatically become abundant simply because one class of production capability becomes widespread.

And this is precisely where Niu Lai helps us observe what may happen when the authority of polished form loosens.

Its most illuminating feature is the visible divergence between “the professionalism of the form” and “the degree to which the work is watched and assigned value.”

Existing reports record criticism of its rough form coexisting with ticket purchases, recommendations, and collective viewing; other commentary attempts to find value in its personal expression and emotional story. The Beijing News on-site report, Li Zhaoxing review

These materials do not directly prove artistic achievement. But at minimum they show that the willingness of audiences to invest attention, money, and interpretive labor does not fully obey a ranking based on professional completion.

For the AI hypothesis, that matters because it displays one possible reordering:

• When professional completion is no longer sufficient to explain viewing choices, audiences look for other differences.
• The creator’s distinctive experience, traces of individuality in expression, story relationships, and modes of participation in viewing can all become such differences.
• Features once treated by professional evaluation as losses may sometimes become sources of recognizability.

Thus, Niu Lai does not show us in advance “what AI cinema will look like.” It shows us how value judgments search for new grounds when an established quality criterion is no longer sufficient to organize audience experience.

But there is an especially important counter-explanation that cannot be skipped:

Part of Niu Lai’s appeal may depend precisely on polished cinema still occupying the normal position.

Its deviation appears rare, jarring, and worth checking out because audiences are accustomed to a particular standard of theatrical animation. If large numbers of works shared similarly rough forms, that attraction might not persist.

What it demonstrates, then, may not simply be that “scarcity no longer matters,” but rather this:

Scarcity can migrate from difficulty of realization to difference from the norm.

That is crucial to thinking about the AI era. Once polished form becomes abundant, rough, handmade, or nonstandard expression may temporarily gain greater distinctiveness. But if those appearances too can be generated cheaply, they may lose scarcity just as quickly. “Looking clumsy” cannot permanently guarantee individuality, just as “looking polished” cannot permanently guarantee creativity.

Value judgments may therefore shift further away from “what the finished object looks like” toward “why it is expressed this way, and whose experience, choices, and responsibility this expression is connected to.” That is a projection, and Niu Lai alone cannot establish it.

Another distinction is also necessary: the production of artistic value and the recognition of artistic value.

If AI primarily lowers the cost of polished form, what it may disrupt first is not artistic value itself, but the way we recognize value:

In the past, completion could serve as a preliminary filter for deciding “this work is worth taking seriously.” If completion becomes generally high in the future, that filter loses discriminating power.

Viewers must invest more attention before they can tell whether a work contains something genuinely worth understanding. In other words, declining scarcity on the production side may simultaneously increase the difficulty of filtering on the reception side. More works, and better-looking works, do not automatically mean that valuable works become easier to discover.

Niu Lai provides a vivid example here: some viewers only began to grant it a kind of attention and interpretation it would not normally have received after suspending conventional quality filters. But that suspension may itself have been driven by curiosity and virality rather than by artistic judgment. The case therefore shows both what older standards may miss and why the mechanisms replacing them are not necessarily more reliable.

If we divide your hypothesis into propositions of differing strength, the kind of support Niu Lai can provide becomes clearer:

A further test could compare several versions built around the same story: the original, a professionally remade version, and an AI-assisted remake. Viewers’ reactions could be observed both without and with knowledge of the production source. Questions should distinguish “visual appeal,” “emotional efficacy,” “distinctiveness,” “respect,” and “willingness to pay,” rather than asking only for a single overall rating. That would begin to separate whether people value perceptual effect, expressive relation, difficulty of realization, or production background.

The part of your hypothesis most worth preserving is this: AI may force value distinctions that have long been obscured by production scarcity into the open; Niu Lai, under very different conditions, exposes some of those distinctions in advance.

It gives us reason to suspect that some of what has historically been praised as “better artistic expression” also contains recognition of high cost, difficulty of realization, and professional qualification. But the next question is not whether all such recognition was false. It is: once these things are no longer automatically guaranteed by the appearance of the finished work, what will make a film worth taking seriously?

Turn 7 | User

Good. At this point, try to organize the discussion above. Use Niu Lai as the point of entry, build a more complete framework, clarify the logic and progression of the argument, construct a coherent deductive process, and summarize the conclusions at the end. Follow the conventions of an academic paper: begin with an introduction/preface, develop the argument through three or four main sections, and end with a conclusion. The length should be around 10,000 to 12,000 Chinese characters, and output it directly as an MD file. In addition, output another MD file containing all of the previous discussion, including this conversation, word for word. Save both MD files to my Google Drive.

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Paper:

When Polish Is No Longer Scarce: Rethinking Paradigms of Film Expression in the Age of AI through the Niu Lai Phenomenon

Abstract

The circulation of Niu Lai challenges a correspondence that is often taken for granted: do professional technique and polished form necessarily produce more effective expression and greater artistic value? Taking the distinction between story and discourse as its analytical starting point, this paper places modeling, animation, voice performance, editing, and related features of the finished film within a broad conception of discourse, and then treats “decoupling” as a critical dismantling of established relations of value-dependence. It proceeds by examining how mature technique simultaneously performs perceptual, expressive, and capability-signaling functions; how deviations in discourse can generate unintended experiences in reception; and how scarcity may migrate once generative AI lowers the threshold for realizing certain forms. The paper argues that Niu Lai is not causal evidence that AI is transforming film production, but it can serve as a diagnostic case for observing the limits of established evaluative paradigms. It suggests that difficulty of production, professional completion, artistic efficacy, and circulation returns are related but cannot substitute for one another. AI may first weaken the capacity of polished form to serve as evidence of labor and ability rather than eliminating its perceptual value. Artistic judgment must therefore become more explicit about how a work organizes experience, why it makes particular choices, and why it deserves the audience’s attention. The paper also limits the scope of inference from the case and from conditional projections, and proposes a testable comparative research design in order to avoid equating reduced technical scarcity directly with the disappearance of artistic scarcity.

Keywords: Niu Lai; story and discourse; form; deconstruction; scarcity; generative artificial intelligence; film evaluation

Introduction: Entering Questions of Value through a Controversial Film

Discussion of Niu Lai can initially appear to be a dispute over whether the film is “good” or “bad.” Are its images and movement technically mature? Is the sound coherent? Is the story moving? Why do audiences laugh? Do the creators deserve respect? These questions are often compressed into a single brief overall judgment. The problem is that they do not refer to the same object. Technical completion, discursive efficacy, story relations, viewing experience, and creative labor can support one another, but they can also diverge. If all are summarized by a single score, unproven inferences between distinct questions may disappear from view.

At minimum, the available public material reveals precisely this inconsistency. On-site interviews by The Beijing News record some viewers simultaneously criticizing the film’s rough production and affirming the pleasure of the screening experience, while a Yunnan Daily response emphasizes growth and family affection. Together they show that different viewing outcomes exist in public reception, but neither source can represent the entire audience or independently determine the work’s artistic status.[1][2] The theoretical problem that concerns this paper arises from that coexistence: if forms habitually regarded as obstacles to expression can still attract viewing, carry emotion, or trigger new interpretations, how should the relationship between technique and value be reconsidered?

The question gains additional significance once AI enters image production. Mature film form often condenses professional training, collaborative labor, and financial organization, thereby creating a threshold of realization. Audiences do not merely appreciate the result; they also infer ability and investment from the result. If certain results can be obtained at far lower cost, their perceptual qualities may remain unchanged while their significance as scarce achievements changes. Two questions must therefore be distinguished: whether AI changes production, and how changes in production affect the recognition of value. The second question cannot be answered by model performance or cost figures alone, because it also involves viewing habits formed over long periods.

This paper combines theoretical argument with case discussion, using news reports from screenings, critical essays, and published analyses of review samples as limited evidence. It does not rest on shot-by-shot coding of the complete film, original audience surveys, or an audit of production costs. Accordingly, it does not treat artistic judgments found in the cited coverage as research facts, nor does it make claims about specific shots or authorial intention beyond what the materials support. Its discussion of AI takes the form of conditional reasoning: if the supply threshold for certain mature forms falls substantially, what happens to their signaling value, differential value, and position in evaluation? It does not assume that every stage of production has already been automated.

The paper is divided into four main sections. The first clarifies the relations among story, discourse, form, and value and explains why traditional associations emerged. The second examines deviations in Niu Lai’s discourse and the restructuring of reception in order to identify the actual object of “deconstruction.” The third considers the migration and limits of scarcity under AI conditions. The fourth reconstructs the argumentative chain, compares competing explanations, and proposes a research design for testing them. The result is not a linear prediction of the future extrapolated directly from one case, but an argument that first distinguishes relationships, then identifies counterexamples, subsequently formulates conditional propositions, and finally specifies evidentiary limits.

I. From the Distinction between Story and Discourse to the Historical Association between Technique and Value

1. An Analytical Distinction: There Is No Pure Film Experience Outside Presentation

The distinction between story and discourse can be summarized as the distinction between what is told and the manner through which what is told becomes present. Chatman’s discussion of narrative offers a classic reference point for this analysis, though this paper does not simply erase terminological differences among theoretical traditions.[6] Here, the story level consists of characters, events, relationships, and the temporal and causal relations reconstructed by viewers. The discourse level refers to the way those contents become perceptible experience in a specific medium, including the organization of information, point of view, pacing, image, sound, and movement.

Under this broad definition, model form, animated movement, lighting, voice performance, and editing in the finished film all belong to the discourse level. To read the phrase “rough production but effective discourse” as implying that production lies outside discourse would be a categorical error. More accurately, some dimensions of discourse may exhibit low completion while others remain effective. Budget, equipment, labor time, and personnel belong to external conditions of production; they participate in expression through their effects on the finished film but cannot be conflated with the filmic form itself.

This distinction allows the researcher to temporarily abstract the structure of the story and test character motivation and consequences of action. But it does not imply that the story can exist independently within the viewing experience. Understanding a mother-child relationship, experiencing danger, or feeling separation always requires mediation through image, language, sound, and temporal organization. Strictly speaking, the claim “the discourse failed completely, but the story still moved me” is contradictory: if the story was perceived and had an effect, then at least some discourse transmitted information, or the viewer supplied missing expression through prior experience.

Accordingly, the “decoupling” proposed here does not mean splitting story and discourse into two independently operating components. It begins as a methodological suspension: temporarily refusing to substitute an evaluation of one dimension for an evaluation of another, and identifying the relations that actually exist between them. From there, a deeper question becomes possible: why have certain features of discourse long been treated as guarantees of artistic value, while others are excluded in advance from serious discussion? This second question is what the paper primarily means by “deconstruction”: an examination of the conditions and internal tensions of value hierarchies, not a claim that form can be abolished.

2. Why Mature Technique Has Real Expressive Value

A critique of established paradigms cannot begin by denying the role of technique. Stable spatial organization helps viewers identify actions; precise layers of sound can distinguish environment, character, and psychological state; fine-grained movement can communicate relationships that dialogue alone may not convey. Professional training makes many effects less dependent on accident, while complex collaboration expands the scale of what creators can handle. There are many genuine connections between technique and expression, and these connections provide an empirical basis for norms.

But genuine connections are not the same as necessary and sufficient relations. The same emotion can be realized through many forms, and the same technique can serve different or even opposing expressions. Detailed imagery may help viewers observe a character, or it may distract attention. Smooth editing may clarify events, or it may make a causal relation that ought to be questioned appear self-evident. Technique can only be evaluated by specifying what it acts upon and under what conditions; proficiency alone cannot be assigned a uniform positive value.

Mature conventions also reduce the costs of collaboration. Production teams need shared terminology and workflows; audiences need to understand image relations quickly; distribution and exhibition require a degree of stability. These demands give conventions institutional rationality, but institutional rationality is not the same as aesthetic necessity. A standard may help organize large-scale production without being the only way in which every work can realize meaning. The more the two are conflated, the easier it becomes to mistake expression that does not conform to production convention for expression that lacks the right to exist at all.

The “traditional paradigm” discussed here is therefore a tendency common in mainstream production and evaluation, not a summary of film history as a whole. Film practice has always contained challenges to transparent narration, natural performance, and high production finish. To say that Niu Lai is worth discussing does not require portraying it as the first work to discover that form can depart from convention. Its significance as a case lies in the fact that such deviation entered a particular circulation environment and made conflicts in value judgment unusually visible.

3. The Three Functions of Polished Form and Their Conflation

Polished form performs at least three functions: perceptual, expressive, and signaling. The perceptual function directly concerns clarity, detail, texture, and the experience of movement. The expressive function concerns how those features organize character, emotion, and meaning. The signaling function allows viewers to infer labor, ability, resources, and the importance of the work from its result. The first two ask what the work does in viewing; the third asks what production conditions the result is taken as evidence of.

When polished form generally requires a high threshold to obtain, such inference has some rational basis. Audiences cannot inspect the creative process of every work in detail, so they use visible completion as a preliminary filter. Expense and difficulty do not guarantee artistic value, but they may serve as indirect clues to serious investment and professional organization. Economic research on signaling reminds us that information conveyed beyond the immediate result can influence judgment. This paper borrows only that analytical direction; it does not equate film reception with a labor-market model.[7]

The problem arises when an indirect clue is promoted into direct value. Moving from “this kind of imagery usually requires considerable capability” to “this kind of imagery necessarily means better expression” skips the question of how the work uses that capability. Moving from “this required enormous labor” to “the audience should assign it higher artistic value” fuses an ethic of labor with aesthetic judgment. Labor may deserve respect without every choice embodied in its result being effective. Conversely, low cost cannot directly prove sincerity or originality.

The authority of polished form therefore has both a perceptual and a social-production basis. Part of its appeal comes from its own effects, part from the difficulty of realization, and part from the professional status historically attached to it. These factors can reinforce one another, but they must be separated analytically. Only then can we understand why the same image may be judged differently before and after viewers learn how it was produced: what has changed may not be the perceptual object, but the information about capability and labor carried by that object.

4. From Empirical Correlation to Default Causality

A common inferential chain that can be tested is this: greater resource investment supports higher professional completion; higher completion supports more effective expression; expressive efficacy in turn supports greater artistic value. Every step is plausible in the real world, but none is exempt from conditions. Resources can be used inefficiently; completion can serve empty choices; expression can accurately communicate content of little complexity; and artistic judgment contains dimensions that cannot be quantified through a single effect.

It is therefore necessary to distinguish necessary conditions, sufficient conditions, and probabilistic relations. “A certain kind of polished form is often helpful” is a probabilistic claim. “Without it, artistic experience cannot occur” is a claim of necessity. “If it is present, the work possesses high artistic value” is a claim of sufficiency. The latter two are stronger and more vulnerable to counterexample. Much debate around controversial works uses experience that supports the first proposition to defend the latter two.

The limited conclusion of this section is therefore as follows: form always participates in expression, but no particular formal norm can unconditionally monopolize the explanation of artistic efficacy. This conclusion does not prejudge Niu Lai as a good film. It merely establishes the premise necessary for analyzing it. The next task is to examine how its discourse and reception make these untested dependencies visible, and to distinguish effects that actually occur from meanings assigned by critics after the fact.

II. The Restructuring of Reception around Niu Lai: How Deviations in Discourse Become Conditions for Meaning

1. The Shift of Attention in Circulation

In viewing that is conventionally centered on story, audiences use discourse to understand the situation of characters. Form may be conspicuous, but it remains connected to the progress of the story. In part of Niu Lai’s circulation, however, attention first falls on form itself: why does the voice sound like this, why are movements connected in this way, why does the character design depart from expectations? Before viewers enter the character’s emotional state, they have already reacted to the means by which that emotion is represented. The means of discourse thus shift from being conditions of transmission to becoming objects of viewing.

The Paper’s survey of the related commentary and circulation records voice imitation, remixing of clips, and ironic evaluation.[3] The interpretation proposed here is that formal differences recognizable within a short span of time are more easily detached from the original story and circulated independently. Viewers do not need to grasp the complete chain of causality to recognize something unusual in a vocal tone or movement. Circulation can therefore increase familiarity with a discourse style without producing a corresponding increase in understanding of the story. It is within this asymmetry that the direct inference from a local formal feature to the value of the whole film becomes especially easy.

Yet formal judgment does not become invalid for that reason. Sound, image, and rhythm are constitutive of film experience, and viewers need not be able to retell the plot before they are entitled to express discomfort. What needs to be constrained is the scope of inference: the fact that certain passages depart from convention does not automatically prove that the story relations have no value; nor does the fact that the story involves family affection cancel the losses caused by form in viewing. Deconstruction does not exempt the film from evaluation. It requires evaluation to say more clearly what exactly it is evaluating.

2. The Separation of Unintended Effects from Artistic Efficacy

Suppose a passage attempts to convey sadness through a solemn vocal tone but instead provokes laughter because of the combination of sound and movement. At least two effects then need to be distinguished: whether the intended emotion was conveyed, and whether another meaningful experience occurred in viewing. Failure in the former does not imply the absence of the latter; the presence of the latter does not retroactively prove the success of the former. Compressing both into the single question of whether the film is “good” or “bad” obscures what is most worth explaining in the case.

Unintended effects are not necessarily inferior to intended ones. The concrete form of a work can generate relations that the creator did not fully anticipate, and audiences may recognize in them the investment, hesitation, or limits of the creative act. Here, authorial intention, formal conditions of the work, and value in reception are three different objects of judgment. The creator’s failure to design an effect explicitly can limit claims about creative intention, but it cannot by itself cancel the effect. Conversely, a sweeping interpretation proposed by viewers does not mean that the work has provided sufficient support for it.

To judge whether an interpretation holds, we should ask whether it depends on specific material, whether it can explain relations among details, and under what conditions it would fail. An interpretation that can be applied without modification to any rough work has very little explanatory power. Calling every mismatch “avant-garde” and every gap “openness” evades close reading just as much as judging every deviation to be a failure. Serious analysis must allow some deviations to generate value while recognizing that others remain only losses.

Artistic expression, then, need not follow an entirely one-way model in which complete intention comes first, skillful execution follows, and accurate reception comes last. Expression may also take shape among intention, material constraints, and reception. Acknowledging this does not deprive professional ability of value; it weakens only the strong premise that effects count as artistically legitimate only when they have been fully mastered by the creator. The significance of discussing Niu Lai can begin with this question without rushing to confer on it the status of an avant-garde work.

3. Clumsiness, Sincerity, and the Perceptibility of the Creator

Commentary on Niu Lai often uses sincerity to reconcile technical criticism with emotional identification. Yet sincerity can refer to at least three sources: character relations, traces within the expression, and the production background. Whether a character cares must be examined through action; whether the expression possesses individuality must be examined through formal details; whether the creators invested long-term labor requires production evidence. The three may reinforce one another, but none can directly guarantee the other two.

Li Zhaoxing’s discussion of the film’s pacing and declamatory language offers an entry point into the question of personal expression.[4] Within the argument advanced here, a nonstandard vocal tone may make viewers feel that a concrete person is speaking rather than merely hearing a character function executed with professional smoothness. If that feeling is real, clumsiness is not simply an obstacle to be overcome; it may become one condition under which the expressive subject is perceptible. But such a claim must be supported by the actual sound and by viewing evidence. It cannot be inferred merely from the creators’ nonprofessional status.

Production background may also alter the meaning of the same feature. Before learning the background, stiff movement may be interpreted as lack of ability; after learning how the film was made, it may be interpreted as a trace of labor. That does not mean the latter interpretation is more truthful or the former more objective. They attend to different information. Research must clarify whether a change in audience evaluation arises from a new discovery about form or from sympathy and respect for the people behind it. If the latter dominates, then the object of evaluation has expanded and the change should not simply be attributed to the emotional power of the story.

This expansion is especially important. Around the creators, media and audiences can organize another sequence of events: limited conditions, prolonged attempts, ridicule, and eventual visibility. This is not a new internal level of the original film, but an external story about its production. Buying a ticket may become a way of participating in the ending of that story, and supporting the creators may itself be experienced as a value choice. The film’s circulation returns should therefore not be treated as a direct measure of the artistic achievement of its original story or discourse.

4. How Audience Participation Changes Experience—and What It Cannot Replace

Viewing never takes place in an environment entirely free of expectation, but the controversy around Niu Lai makes the role of expectation particularly visible. Watching alone, watching as a parent with children, and watching collectively in order to recognize memes place the same passage within different relations of attention. One viewer waits for character growth, another waits for a familiar voice, and another watches to see when the whole theater will laugh. What appears on the screen has not changed, but the goal of the viewing activity has. Not every difference in response can therefore be explained as a direct reflection of the properties of the film.

Pan Liunong’s commentary brings viewers’ interest in other viewers’ reactions into the discussion and notes that mockery can still be converted into commercial returns.[5] From this, the paper distinguishes three objects of evaluation: the finished film, the live experience triggered by it, and the later circulation event. The three can shape one another, but the value of the latter two cannot be credited entirely back to the finished film. Likewise, defects in the film cannot erase the genuine pleasure, interaction, or reflection that participants may have obtained. Many apparent contradictions arise precisely from applying a single evaluative scale to different objects.

For this reason, neither “buying a ticket means approval” nor “if you think the film is rough, you cannot have obtained value from it” is defensible. Five-star ratings may be ironic; negative reviews may function as invitations; recommendations may concern the rarity of an experience rather than artistic quality. Review samples reported in the press point to this semantic misalignment, but the sampling period, platform selection, and coding methods limit their generalizability. The proportions in such samples cannot be treated as public opinion as a whole.[3] What the data support here is the need to interpret indicators, not the idea that majority vote has settled an artistic judgment.

The deconstructive effect revealed in this section therefore occurs largely within established value oppositions: lack of skill may make individuality more visible; estrangement may encourage observation; seriousness may produce comedy; expressive frustration may trigger new experience. None of these possibilities makes roughness automatically superior to polish. They merely require us to acknowledge that what had been placed on the negative side may sometimes participate in the creation of positive value. The question thus shifts from “should we tolerate insufficient technique?” to “what, in this specific case, does this insufficiency actually change?”

III. The Migration of Scarcity under AI Conditions: From Thresholds of Realization to Choice and Recognition

1. What AI May Change First Is the Correspondence between Form and Cost

A discussion of AI should not equate the emergence of new tools with the automation of the entire creative process. This paper adopts a limited premise: suppose some audiovisual results that once required substantial training, labor time, and capital can now be obtained reliably by more people at lower cost. That premise may hold for particular stages without implying that feature-length structure, character consistency, and overall control become equally easy. Cost changes can be highly uneven across stages, and “all technique is no longer scarce” is not the starting assumption here.

Under this premise, the most direct change concerns the correspondence between form and difficulty of realization. In the past, a certain kind of image often implied the possession of certain skills and resources. Once the supply threshold falls, the same image can be produced from very different scales of investment. Viewers may still appreciate its detail and movement, but they can no longer infer production conditions reliably from appearance alone. The perceptual function of form may remain while its signaling function weakens; the two do not disappear in tandem.

The key point is not that “if something is easy to obtain, it has no value.” Lower costs of lighting, reproduction, or distribution do not logically eliminate the sensory properties of images. A more precise claim is that the astonishment, respect, and status contributed by difficulty of realization may change. If an evaluation previously bundled sensory pleasure with recognition of difficult labor, then the overall evaluation can shift once the mode of production changes even if the visible result remains largely the same. Research must identify which component has changed.

At the same time, tools may expand what could previously not be realized at all, allowing more distinctive experiences to acquire media form. That is the other side of lowering the threshold of supply and cannot be summarized merely as “the devaluation of form.” The decline of signaling authority and the expansion of expressive opportunity can occur simultaneously: established polished appearances no longer guarantee scarce capability, while new creators gain sufficient means of expression. Whether valuable works result still depends on how those means are selected and organized.

2. An Abundance of Polished Form Is Not the Same as an Abundance of Artistic Expression

To avoid conceptual slippage, we need to distinguish the completion of a watchable result from the completion of an experience worth returning to. Generating more candidate images may reduce the burden of execution while intensifying the problem of selection: why this image rather than another, why maintain this rhythm, why preserve silence here? Such decisions concern the work as a whole. A tool can participate in or even propose choices, but that does not mean the value of those choices no longer requires judgment, nor does it mean that all choices have become inexpensive.

Yet meaning, aesthetics, or choice should not simply be declared permanently and exclusively human. Doing so would merely move the old scarcity from production into a new category whose scarcity has not been demonstrated. The conclusion here remains conditional: when one bottleneck weakens, other bottlenecks that have not weakened become relatively more salient. Which bottlenecks remain scarce over the long term is an empirical matter. The migration of scarcity does not permanently secure the boundary of any particular profession.

More importantly, an increase in the number of works and an increase in artistic value are not the same statistical object. Even if the absolute number of valuable works rises, audiences may find them harder to locate. If evaluation continues to prioritize surface completion, it loses discriminatory power: when large numbers of works clear the same threshold, crossing the threshold itself no longer tells us which one deserves more attention. Improvement in production conditions can therefore be accompanied by deterioration in reception conditions, or at least by a greater prominence of the filtering problem.

AI may thus first create difficulties in the recognition of value rather than the disappearance of artistic value itself. Quick judgments that audiences once made through technique and investment have to be replaced by more concrete reasons. Recommenders, critics, and creators alike will have to say what kind of experience a work organizes, what questions it engages, and why its forms matter here. This shift does not require everyone to perform academic analysis, but it does require evaluation to move beyond visible completion as its primary basis.

3. From the Scarcity of Difficulty to the Scarcity of Difference

What Niu Lai contributes to the above projection is evidence that professional completion does not explain every viewing choice. But there is a reverse explanation: part of its appeal may depend on its strong difference from conventional theatrical works. If similar styles became common, audiences might no longer find them rare. The case therefore cannot prove that scarcity has ceased to matter. It may instead show that scarcity can migrate from technical difficulty to difference relative to the surrounding environment.

Such migration is relational. No formal feature remains distinctive forever independently of the conditions of supply. When polish is ubiquitous, roughness may stand out; if roughness becomes fashionable, another form of restraint or precision may become distinctive. Nothing here implies that roughness is the universal aesthetic direction of the future. Treating temporary difference as stable value would return criticism to label-based judgment: where smoothness was once automatically praised, visible imperfection would now be praised, but the underlying logic would remain unchanged.

If AI tools eventually become capable of simulating handmade traces, hesitant tones, or low-finish appearances, “traces of the human” likewise cannot be authenticated by style alone. This is not a claim that all such simulation has already matured; it is a theoretical recursion. Once a particular appearance becomes a marker of sincerity, it can be deliberately produced. The relationship between lived experience and visible style may become unreliable in the same way that the relationship between capital investment and polished appearance becomes unreliable.

Creative provenance, records of process, and sustained practice may therefore attract more attention, but they are not automatically trustworthy and do not directly equal artistic value. Viewers can respect a real history of labor while judging the finished film mediocre; they can also recognize a work formed with AI assistance without demanding that every detail be handmade. Information about provenance helps explain experience, but cannot substitute for the experience itself. Future evaluation must avoid moving from worship of results to an unexamined worship of origins.

4. Lower Production Thresholds Are Not Synonymous with the Dispersion of Power

Lowering the cost of some production processes can broaden participation, but creative opportunity remains constrained by discovery, distribution, access to resources, and the ability to sustain work over time. Being able to make something does not mean being able to get it seen; being seen does not mean being able to sustain a practice. This paper makes no prediction about the specific market structure of these conditions. It simply marks the logical boundary: the diffusion of technical capability and the dispersion of attention are two separate propositions, and the former does not automatically prove the latter.

If large numbers of works compete for relatively limited viewing time, distribution channels and filtering mechanisms may gain greater influence. A lower threshold for realizing form may even make external narratives more important: who the creator is, what event surrounds the work, and what watching it is taken to signify may all become reasons for attracting attention. The Niu Lai phenomenon suggests this possibility, but cannot prove that such a tendency will become universal, much less justify defining circulation ability as a substitute for artistic ability.

This perspective also allows professional labor to be repositioned. Its value need not rest on the claim that “without professional training, art cannot happen.” It can instead be justified by greater precision of control, a wider expressive range, lower loss in the realization of complex relations, and greater reliability of effects. Even if some technical abilities become widespread, these contributions still need to be evaluated one by one. Professional authority grounded in concrete efficacy can accommodate technological change; authority grounded primarily in difficulty and credential is more likely to lose persuasive force as thresholds change.

The conclusion of this section is that AI may produce not a simple collapse of scarcity to zero but a relative redistribution among different scarce conditions. Some forms of execution may become abundant while selection, verification, trust, and attention become more salient. None of these changes guarantees artistic progress or implies artistic decline. They first require us to separate sources of value that were previously bundled together and to justify anew why each form of creative activity merits investment.

IV. From an Observational Window to Testable Argument: Evidence, Competing Explanations, and the Reconstruction of Evaluation

1. What Niu Lai Can Refute—and What It Cannot Prove

The argumentative force of a case depends on the strength of the proposition being tested. If someone claims that no viewing value can arise without polished form, then credible evidence of a contrary case is enough to challenge that universal proposition. If the claim is only that polished form generally aids expression, one exceptional case is not sufficient to refute it. Still less can the attention received by Niu Lai justify the conclusion that works of the same kind generally possess higher artistic value.

Viewing value must also be strictly distinguished from artistic value. Pleasure, social participation, curiosity, and support for the creators are all genuine reasons for action, but they do not automatically prove the artistic quality of the finished film. A stronger artistic claim requires additional explanation: how does the form organize experience, what relationships possess complexity, and do these effects remain after the specific viral context has faded? The case material used here is sufficient to pose these questions, but not to deliver a final judgment.

Most importantly, the circulation of Niu Lai was not produced by the AI-driven cost-reduction mechanism discussed in this paper and therefore cannot function as a natural experiment for that mechanism. Without identifying actual AI use, cost changes, and appropriate comparison conditions, no causal effect of AI can be estimated. The proper role of the case is to show that established associations are not logical necessities and to provide a conceptual reference for how evaluation might change under different production conditions. Its role is diagnostic and heuristic, not predictive proof.

A complete argument therefore requires two independent supports. On one side, reception evidence can test whether mature form monopolizes viewing and meaning. On the other, production research must test whether AI actually changes supply thresholds, and in which stages. Only after the second premise receives independent support is it legitimate to infer what pressure those production changes might place on the first relationship. Collapsing the two supports into the claim that “Niu Lai has already proved the artistic trend of the AI era” would skip a crucial evidentiary step.

2. Competing Explanations and Causal Identification

At least four competing explanations need to be tested. The first is a story explanation: viewers are mainly attracted by character relations, and rough form merely fails to block the effect completely. The second is a formal explanation: certain nonstandard features themselves generate a distinctive experience. The third is a background explanation: viewers’ respect comes primarily from the creators’ history. The fourth is an event explanation: the pleasure comes mainly from collective participation and identification with a cultural moment. These explanations can coexist, but each implies a different artistic judgment.

The same audience response cannot automatically distinguish among them. “I was moved in the end” may refer to the story, the sound, or the creators’ background. “It is really worth seeing” may refer to the work or to a rare live experience. Research needs more detailed information about timing and reasons: at what passage did the reaction occur, what did viewers know beforehand, and why did their evaluation change? If we rely only on overall scores, different mechanisms are compressed into one outcome variable and analytical power declines.

Selection bias also cannot be ignored. People willing to buy tickets because of viral attention may already be inclined toward curiosity; people willing to write long reviews may have stronger motives of expression or position-taking. A single lively screening cannot represent solitary viewing, and highly liked comments in circulation cannot represent silent viewers. More importantly, selecting only one viral low-cost work without examining the many similar works that attracted no attention will overestimate the probability that deviation from convention succeeds.

Counterfactual questions can clarify these mechanisms but cannot substitute for actual evidence. If the same story were remade in a more mature form, would viewers be more moved or less? If the production background were unknown, would audiences still perceive individuality? Outside an atmosphere of collective laughter, would the original interest persist? These questions are not designed to identify one uniquely correct version, but to distinguish which factor actually contributes to which kind of experience.

3. A Comparative Research Design

A feasible research design could vary three dimensions: the version of the finished film, information about provenance, and viewing conditions. Version comparison should keep story events, dialogue content, and temporal structure as stable as possible while changing a clearly specified formal dimension. Provenance comparison could show the same version either without or with accurate background information. Viewing-condition comparison could contrast solitary with collective viewing. If temporary concealment or experimental labels are used, research ethics and debriefing should be observed; participants should not be persistently misled about provenance.

Such a design still faces difficulties. A professional remake or AI remake will often change multiple dimensions at once, and the “same story” may itself acquire different meanings through altered performance and pacing. Version differences therefore cannot simply be attributed to one technical factor. A safer approach would begin with small-scale comparisons of particular passages to define the manipulated object clearly, then supplement them with interviews after complete viewings. It must also be acknowledged that conclusions from local experiments cannot be generalized unconditionally to feature-length experience.

Outcome measures should record separately sensory pleasure, narrative comprehension, emotional engagement, perceived distinctiveness, respect for labor, artistic evaluation, and willingness to pay. These may correlate, but they should not be forced into a single score. Delayed evaluation should also be included to observe what remains after the stimulus of virality weakens. If a particular kind of value exists only in a specific social environment, it is still worth studying—but its proper object of attribution must be identified accurately.

Testing the AI hypothesis also requires independent production research: actual labor time, number of revisions, cost, and difficulty of control should be compared under the same quality constraints, while the stability with which creators of different experience levels achieve the result should be recorded. A clip that is easy to generate does not represent the cost structure of an entire film, and a successful demonstration does not represent average production efficiency. Execution, selection, rework, and integration all need to be included before we can judge how far the threshold has fallen and whether the bottleneck has merely moved.

The design is falsifiable. If formal differences cease to produce meaningful effects once provenance and viewing conditions are controlled, the interpretation that clumsiness itself has value should be narrowed. If real-world AI use does not lower the threshold for the specified task, the corresponding inference about scarcity should be suspended. If polished form retains the same signaling function even after becoming abundant, additional mechanisms of certification or social status must be sought. The theory must allow these results to modify its conclusions.

4. From Judgments of Qualification to Concrete Judgments of Efficacy

A new evaluative framework does not need to abandon technique; it needs to change how technical judgments are made. Instead of saying “this is not professional enough, so it has no value,” criticism should explain how a particular sound obstructs understanding or how a particular movement weakens a character relationship. Instead of saying “this is sincere, so the defects do not matter,” criticism should explain how a form of personal expression produces an experience that cannot be replaced by knowledge of the production story. The more concrete the judgment, the better it can acknowledge both achievement and loss at once.

Similarly, works involving AI should not be judged empty in advance merely because of their generative origin, nor should technological sophistication automatically confer the status of innovation. The questions are how the tool is used, whether the choices relate to one another, whether the work can support the questions it raises, and how the creator assumes responsibility for the final presentation. Responsibility here does not mean authorship credit alone; it includes the capacity to explain, revise, and acknowledge the consequences of the work’s choices. A tool cannot automatically perform that responsibility on the creator’s behalf.

This kind of evaluation does not seek a single unified scale that eliminates disagreement. Different viewers may value different experiences, but reasons and evidence still need to be articulated. The openness of artistic judgment does not mean that every interpretation is equally adequate; the personal nature of experience does not make experience beyond discussion. The task of effective criticism is to make visible what a particular form does under particular conditions, rather than ending analysis quickly with labels that are either pro-professional or anti-professional.

The deductive chain that emerges therefore has clear limits: no particular mature form is a necessary condition for all value; part of its authority depends on production difficulty and inferences about ability; if AI changes those production conditions, its signaling authority may change as well; such change does not eliminate perceptual or expressive functions but requires value sources to be identified anew. Niu Lai supports the questionable relation at the front end of this chain and some of its consequences in reception. Research on AI production is required to establish the technical premise in the middle, while future comparative research must test the changes projected at the far end.

Conclusion: How Can Film Value Be Explained Once Polish Is No Longer Scarce?

The most important gain from entering the film-and-AI discussion through Niu Lai is not to rerank a controversial work. It is to notice that several judgments long layered on top of one another actually require separate argument. Technical skill, polished form, large investment, effective expression, audience pleasure, and artistic value are not synonyms. They have empirical relations, but those relations cannot be compressed into an unquestioned causal chain. “Decoupling” means suspending those automatic inferences; “deconstruction” means going further and examining their value hierarchies and historical conditions.

This paper reaches four conclusions. First, story and discourse can be distinguished analytically, but film experience cannot bypass form; production as manifested in the finished film belongs to the discourse level, while production resources belong to external conditions. Second, some of the reception phenomena surrounding Niu Lai show that deviations in discourse can both damage intended expression and become conditions for new experience; authorial intention alone cannot determine their total value. Third, polished form combines perceptual, expressive, and signaling functions. If AI lowers the threshold for realizing it, the first change may be to its evidentiary power as proof of labor and capability rather than to its formal efficacy itself. Fourth, scarcity may migrate among execution, difference, choice, trust, and attention; a decline in local production cost does not justify the conclusion that artistic scarcity as a whole disappears.

The evidentiary strength of these conclusions is not uniform. The materials on Niu Lai are sufficient to show that viewing motivation and objects of evaluation can separate, and to question overly strong claims of necessity. They cannot determine the film’s final artistic status, much less prove that AI will drive cinema in one inevitable direction. Claims about the future therefore remain conditional, and the paper has proposed research paths through which they could be narrowed or rejected.

The change worth anticipating is a shift in evaluation from difficult-to-obtain appearances toward expressive relations that can be specified. Polish can remain valuable; clumsiness may also be worth preserving. Both require an explanation of what they accomplish within a work. When labor and ability can no longer be read automatically from the surface of the finished product, the task of criticism is neither to announce the end of art nor to romanticize low completion. It is to answer more seriously: why does this form appear here, what kind of experience does it organize, and why is it worth giving a portion of the audience’s finite lifetime to it?

References

[1] Teng Chao. 《牛来》靠“抽象”出圈：有观众驱车30公里只为见证“历史” [Niu Lai Goes Viral through Its “Absurdity”: Some Viewers Drive 30 Kilometers Just to Witness “History”] [EB/OL]. The Beijing News, 2026-08-15. Original.

[2] Dou Chongyin. 没忍住，还是去看了《牛来》 [I Couldn’t Resist: I Went to See Niu Lai After All] [EB/OL]. Yunnan Daily—Yun News, 2026-08-27. Original.

[3] Han Yutong, Wang Yasai. 骂它、捧它、玩它、见证它，1490条影评里的《牛来》 [Condemn It, Praise It, Play with It, Witness It: Niu Lai in 1,490 Film Reviews] [EB/OL]. The Paper, 2026-08-18. Original.

[4] Li Zhaoxing. 《牛來》怎樣出來、講什麼、為何爆？ [How Did Niu Lai Come About, What Does It Say, and Why Did It Go Viral?] [EB/OL]. P-articles / 虚词, 2026-08-25. Original.

[5] Pan Liunong. 《牛來》不是行為藝術，還是我們早已活在行為藝術裡？ [Is Niu Lai Not Performance Art, or Have We Long Been Living inside Performance Art?] [EB/OL]. P-articles / 虚词, 2026-09-01. Original.

[6] CHATMAN S. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film [M]. Cornell University Press, 1978. Bibliographic information and publisher description. This paper borrows only the basic distinction between story and discourse and does not claim to have conducted a page-by-page reading of the entire book.

[7] The Nobel Prize. The Prize in Economic Sciences 2001—Press release [EB/OL]. 2001. Official explanation. This paper borrows the analytical direction of signaling theory; it does not attribute the film-specific inferences here to Spence’s original model, nor does it use this source as evidence for specific causal relations in film reception.

Sources and writing note: Online materials were retrieved through September 16, 2026. Factual statements about Niu Lai are limited to what the cited reports and commentary can support. Further claims concerning viewing mechanisms, value relations, and the effects of AI are analyses, hypotheses, or conditional inferences proposed in this paper. The paper was organized and expanded from the discussion in this topic. It is a theoretical discussion draft, not an empirical research report based on shot-by-shot analysis of the complete film or an audience experiment.