중국 고전 문학 연구에서 AI 챗봇 文心一言의 활용 가능성 탐색

Abstract

Baidu, China’s largest portal company, unveiled its AI chatbot service ‘Ernie Bot (文心一言)’ to the world on March 16 this year. However, after the announcement, Baidu’s stock price plummeted, and public criticism that Ernie Bot was significantly inferior to OpenAI's ‘ChatGPT’ could not be avoided. Even in Korea, Ernie Bot has not received much attention to date, and is often considered unfamiliar even to people working in Chinese-related fields. However, compared to ChatGPT, which is an English-language based model, Ernie Bot, which is based on Chinese, is expected to have some use in some way in academic circles studying the Chinese literature. In particular, when studying Chinese classics, too much time is spent trying to understand the contents of works that are not interpreted in Baihuawen (vernacular Chinese literature, 白話文), or it often happens that it is difficult to acquire detailed information about authors or works that are not covered in the literary history. Accordingly, the author, a researcher of classical Chinese prose, personally tried using the AI chatbot Ernie Bot, and while exploring the possibility of what role this could play in actual classical Chinese research, I also looked at the limitations that have been revealed to date. First, I gave some examples of how Ernie Bot can be used in the study of classic Chinese literature, and I tested how precisely Ernie Bot can identify the general plot of a work or search for authors or works that meet specific criteria. Next, as I examined the specific possibility of using Ernie Bot, focusing on Lou Yue’s “Beixingrilu”, a work from the Southern Song Dynasty, after looking at how detailed Ernie Bot searches for basic information about “Beixingrilu”, I also tired testing how accurately one paragraph of the work could be translated into Baihuawen (vernacular Chinese literature, 白話文). Also, considering that this work is in the form of a travelogue that records the author’s long journey from his family home through the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty to the capital of the Jin Dynasty, in addition to literary research, I also attempted to explore how Ernie Bot could be used in research on China's geographic information and local customs and culture.