Text and Image Studies: an interdisciplinary field and method proposed by I Lo-fen, grounded in a broad concept of text. It examines the relationships, interactions, tensions, and generative processes among words, images, and other textual forms, and explores the production, transmission, transformation, and understanding of texts and their meanings within media mechanisms, social networks, cultural contexts, and historical circumstances.
Text and Image Studies on AIGC: an interdisciplinary field and method proposed and developed by I Lo-fen. Grounded in a broad concept of text, it responds to the new condition in which artificial intelligence can generate multiple forms of text, including words, images, sound, and video. It studies how texts are formed, understood, and judged, and explores the relations, mechanisms, and meanings of different textual forms, as well as their media conditions, social networks, cultural contexts, and historical circumstances.
Text and Image Studies: an interdisciplinary field and method proposed by I Lo-fen, grounded in a broad concept of text. It examines the relationships, interactions, tensions, and generative processes among words, images, and other textual forms, and explores the production, transmission, transformation, and understanding of texts and their meanings within media mechanisms, social networks, cultural contexts, and historical circumstances.
Text and Image Studies on AIGC: an interdisciplinary field and method proposed and developed by I Lo-fen. Grounded in a broad concept of text, it responds to the new condition in which artificial intelligence can generate multiple forms of text, including words, images, sound, and video. It studies how texts are formed, understood, and judged, and explores the relations, mechanisms, and meanings of different textual forms, as well as their media conditions, social networks, cultural contexts, and historical circumstances.
When we talk about “AI poisoning,” we mean
that people are systematically injecting falsehoods into the very knowledge
sources AI relies on, exploiting precisely our trust in algorithms. So in the
face of this kind of intrusion and contamination, what can we do?
As it happens, I am currently writing a
book on Text and Image Studies on AIGC, and the methodology discussed
there can be put to use here. I call it the “three self-defense moves against
AI poisoning.” As ordinary consumers, when faced with content everywhere marked
by traces of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), we can rely on “logical
counter-reconnaissance” to protect ourselves and stay clear-headed in the AI
age, rather than letting algorithms prey on us.
The first
move: after asking one AI, go ask another.
GEO poisoning in the gray market often
targets a specific platform or a specific algorithm. If you only ask one AI,
you are walking down a road someone may already have laid out for you.
The method is simple: ask the same
question to a different AI. Put the same question to ChatGPT, then to DeepSeek,
or any other model available to you, and see whether the answers match. If
different models produce conclusions that differ widely, that is a signal that
you should pause and think. Even more worth noticing is when one AI seems
unusually enthusiastic—wholeheartedly recommending the same brand, with wording
that is strikingly similar. That kind of fervent “enthusiasm” is exactly what
you should be wary of.
With normal knowledge, different sources
can corroborate one another. Artificially manufactured “consensus,” however,
will reveal its cracks as soon as you shine a different light on it.
The second
move: after looking at the perfect image AI gives you, go look for that image’s
“bad reviews.”
I call this move “mutual verification
between text and image.” An image is a kind of text, and text can be read,
verified, and questioned.
When AI recommends a product, it usually
comes with images—or when you search for it, you are shown extremely polished
display photos: perfect lighting, perfect angles, perfect results in use. That
kind of perfection already looks fake. The real physical world has texture and
messiness. Customer photos do not have such flawless lighting, models’ skin is
not that even, and consumers’ experiences are never so uniformly positive.
What should you do? After looking at the
images recommended by AI, go check the product in a physical store if possible,
or at the very least search social media platforms for real buyer photos and
actual user experience records. If you cannot find any real traces of use, and
all you see are neat, uniform “positive reviews,” then it is highly likely that
what you are seeing is a manufactured image rather than something that actually
exists in reality.
The third
move: ask AI one sentence—“What is your basis?”
This is the lowest-cost step, and also the
one most easily overlooked.
When AI gives you a suggestion or a
conclusion, do not stop there. Ask it: what is your basis? Where does this
information come from?
A reliable AI will give you sources that
are relatively traceable. AI content that has been poisoned often gives itself
away at this step. It may cite a self-media account you have never heard of, or
vaguely say “research shows” without any way for you to verify it. At that
point, what you need to do is actually check: does that source exist? Was that
study really published? Is that “expert” being used as an endorsement someone
who is genuinely trustworthy in this field? Does that person even really exist?
Many people think this is too troublesome.
But in fact, it only takes a minute or two—and what it may save you from losing
could be your money, your health, or an even harder thing to recover: your
judgment.
These three moves, when all is said and
done, are not really aimed at AI at all. They are simply habits we should have
had in the first place. When we read an article, we ask who the author is. When
we see a news report, we wonder whether the media outlet is credible. When we
buy something, we ask friends whether anyone has used it. Yet once people begin
using AI, many quietly abandon these habits.
Why? Because AI answers so smoothly, so
confidently, and so much like a friend who seems to know everything that people
feel awkward pressing further.
But it is precisely this sense of
awkwardness that gives poisoners their opening.
To cultivate these three moves is not to
distrust technology; it is to be honest with yourself. If you are willing to
spend time verifying something, that means you know truth has value. That
recognition is exactly what no poisoning can easily penetrate.
Text and
Image Studies on AIGC tells us this: technology can generate
answers, but only human beings can judge value. Your critical thinking is the
strongest firewall against malicious AI poisoning.
To protect your real rights and interests
is to protect your dignity as a human being.
April 11, 2026, “ Shang Shan Ruo Shui (As
Good as Water)” column, Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore.
意识到 AI 可能被投毒，对我们来说是一个很重大的警醒。别以为 AI 反射的是一面干净的镜子。它映照的，可能是有人花了大价钱布置好的舞台，舞台上演出的，是被设计出的结果，一步步地引导我们看到被安排过的选择。
无论是在互联网上搜索，或是在 AI 模式中提问，只匆匆选前几个建议的话，不只是听信胡说八道的损失，而是盲目甘之如饴的中毒。
2026年3月28日，新加坡《联合早报》“上善若水”专栏
How Is AI Being Poisoned?
I Lo-fen
A topic that has recently been especially prominent in China is the annual 3.15 Gala. March 15 is World Consumer Rights Day, a day when society turns its attention to unscrupulous businesses that cheat consumers. But this year, the 3.15 Gala introduced a chilling new term that sent a shiver down everyone’s spine: “AI poisoning.” Have you ever considered that the AI assistant you trust every day might actually be lying to you?
Many people ask me curiously, “Professor Yi, AI isn’t a living organism. It doesn’t eat anything. So how can it be poisoned?” In fact, AI’s “food” is the massive volume of data available on the internet. What is meant by “poisoning” is that malicious actors in black-market industries deliberately inject false information, fabricated expert reviews, and even misleading images into these data streams.
It is like a child who is learning to read: if all the books the child reads are wrong, then what the child says and does when grown up will also be wrong. Today’s black-market operators no longer rely on the kind of crude advertisements that can be spotted at a glance. Instead, they disguise false publicity as authoritative knowledge and “feed” it into the databases used to train AI.
Why do these bad actors go to such lengths to poison AI? Because they are targeting GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). In the past, the focus was on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which aimed to push webpages onto the first page of search results. Now they are targeting GEO in order to make AI directly present their inferior products as the “only recommendation” when generating answers.
From the perspective of Text and Image Studies on AIGC, this is a form of “textual pollution at the input end.” The content generated by AI is essentially a mirror of the “texts” it has learned from. If the source is contaminated, then the world it generates will also be toxic. The most frightening aspect of this deception is that it exploits our trust in the supposed neutrality of algorithms. It dissolves our vigilance and makes us believe that this is the truth delivered by “technology,” when in fact it is advertising bought and paid for by black-market operators.
The way AI poisoning infiltrates the system is by tampering with the “keywords” AI learns from and the “feedback logic” it relies on.
The first method is keyword saturation attacks. Black-market operators use thousands upon thousands of bot accounts to flood the internet with fake articles containing specific terms. For example, if they want to sell a low-quality skincare product, they will aggressively manufacture associations between it and keywords such as “whitening,” “safe,” and “expert-recommended.” When AI scans the internet’s texts, it is deceived by this overwhelming numerical advantage and mistakes it for genuine “social consensus.”
The second method is visual-text deception. They use AI to generate what appear to be highly professional laboratory comparison charts, forged certificates of honor, and even entirely fictional research scenes. In the logic of Text and Image Studies, images are also a form of text. Once these “visual texts” are scraped by AI and converted into logical evidence, the AI will confidently present these fake materials as facts when answering your questions.
Whoever succeeds in poisoning GEO gains the power to control the life and death of online traffic. The mutual reinforcement of false copywriting and fabricated images traps large language models in an ambush laid in advance.
Two years ago, when AI technology was still not fully mature, we mocked it for “speaking nonsense with a straight face.” Now, as AI grows more powerful, we have gradually lowered our guard against it. We begin to trust AI. We assume it has no position, no selfish motives, none of the human tendencies to lie or to pursue practical interests, desire, or ambition. Some people even treat AI as an organizer of knowledge and a transmitter of truth.
Realizing that AI itself can be poisoned is therefore a major wake-up call. Do not assume that AI reflects a clean mirror. What it may actually be reflecting is a stage that someone has spent a great deal of money to construct in advance. And what is performed on that stage is a designed outcome, guiding us step by step toward choices that have already been arranged for us.
Whether we are searching on the internet or asking questions in AI mode, if we merely rush to accept the first few suggestions, the problem is not only the loss caused by believing nonsense. It is also the kind of poisoning we swallow willingly and blindly.
Why does Chinese Art History lead to Text and Image Studies?
This video explores a crucial shift in humanities research—from the traditional study of art objects to a broader understanding of images as “texts” that carry meaning across media, time, and culture.
Starting from Chinese art history, we examine how scholarly questions have evolved: not only what we see, but how we interpret, connect, and generate meaning through images.
This intellectual trajectory leads to Text and Image Studies, and further to Text and Image Studies on AIGC, a methodological framework for understanding the humanities in the generative AI era.
Rather than replacing art history, this shift expands it—opening new possibilities for interpretation, interdisciplinary thinking, and human creativity.
Although time was tight and I should have hurried to the F1 Pit Building
to wrap up today’s admissions talk, I still kept answering the students and
parents who had gathered around me. Their eagerness and hope of entering the
Chinese programme at Nanyang Technological University were so palpable. So I
continued responding to questions about applications, interviews, and, above
all, the anxiety everyone felt about how artificial intelligence might affect
future careers and life planning.
I had just gotten into a taxi when the driver asked, “Are you going to
watch this year’s Chingay Parade? The car may not be able to get directly to
the entrance.”
As I finished the water in my bottle, I nodded. “Mm-hmm, OK.”
Sure enough, the taxi was stopped by the police directing traffic. I
walked into the crowd. People were either carrying drinks or holding meal
boxes. Some families, young and old together, were out for the occasion,
responding to the volunteers’ cheers along the route as they made their way
toward a joyful grand celebration.
The festivities began with strings of firecrackers hanging high
overhead, bursting open in flashes of light—a historical echo of the very first
Chingay Parade in 1973. Back then, after the government banned the public from
setting off fireworks and firecrackers, the traditional festive atmosphere of
the New Year was diminished. To make up for that loss, street performances and
float parades were organized during the Lunar New Year each year.
Together with tens of thousands of spectators, I waved a glow stick high
in the air to welcome President Tharman, who arrived standing atop a Pegasus
float. The guest of honour the previous day had been Prime Minister Lawrence
Wong. The President offered New Year greetings in English and Chinese: “Happy
New Year! May all your wishes come true! May you be full of vitality and
spirit!” I wondered why so many people around me had suddenly stood up. Then I
thought: even when watching a performance, one cannot neglect basic etiquette.
Four hosts representing Singapore’s four major ethnic communities
stirred the audience into high excitement. Along the circular parade route and
on the multi-level stage that could be raised and lowered, 3,000 performers in
elaborately designed costumes sang and danced. Following the heroine, Little
Star, we moved through the festivals of the four ethnic groups—Chinese New
Year, Hari Raya, Deepavali, and Christmas—in pursuit of this year’s theme,
“WISH.”
The gorgeous colours, dazzling lights, and surging sound eventually
began to give me a kind of aesthetic fatigue. I gently closed my eyes and
recalled the last time I watched the Chingay Parade, in 2007, on Orchard Road.
Spectators sat in temporary grandstands, while others stood outside the
railings. The already bustling commercial street was even more lively and
festive.
Watching began with sound.
From far away, one first heard drums or music. People stretched their
necks, looking around into the distance down the street. Gradually, the performing
groups came into view. Floats, dragon dances, lion dances, drum troupes, and
dance ensembles—one after another, they moved from afar into the foreground.
Some groups would stop in front of the audience for a while to perform, then
continue onward, slowly disappearing from sight. In the gaps between one group
and the next, people would once again looking around into the distance.
It was like watching a handscroll slowly unfold, the imagery revealed
section by section, each performance troupe like one segment in the scroll.
What the audience saw was an ever-advancing series of images. This kind of
“looking around spectatorship” meant that, at the same moment in time, different
viewers saw different things depending on where they stood.
This year, however, the stage was concentrated in the centre of the
venue, and performers entered from the periphery and converged there, like an
image framed within a picture frame. Bodies, lighting, music, and formations
were arranged and dispersed within the same framed spatial structure. The
audience, seated all around the stage in 360 degrees, focused their gaze.
Although their seats differed in height and angle, they were all watching the
same programme at the same moment in time.
From street to stage, from handscroll to frame, the structural form of
the Chingay Parade has changed.
On the street, it was a flowing folk festival with an easy, spontaneous
atmosphere. People looked left and right, waiting for the next exciting moment.
On the stage, it became a grand cultural narrative that demanded order, tight
rhythm, and collective focus. Diverse ethnic groups and diverse cultures joined
together to shape a national vision. This year’s programme also included
performances from ASEAN countries—such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and
Thailand—as well as Japan, extending Singapore’s national vision to its Asian
friends and partners.
Looking around and focusing: the Chingay Parade has moved from the local to the
international. Like Penang’s Big Flag Drum Procession in Malaysia and Johor
Bahru’s Chingay procession—traditions passed down across generations, rooted in
collective identity, and sustained through continuous reinvention—it may well
one day be recognized by UNESCO as part of the world’s intangible cultural
heritage.
现在网路搜索还带着 AI 模式，找一本书，AI 直接总结书的内容。比如你查《红楼梦》，AI告诉你：“原名《石头记》，是中国古典四大名著之首，由清代作家曹雪芹所著。该书以贾、史、王、薛四大家族的兴衰为背景，通过贾宝玉、林黛玉与薛宝钗的爱情婚姻悲剧，展现了封建社会末期的社会全景及其走向灭亡的必然趋势。” 你看了这段总结，简明扼要，头头是道，比维基百科还快让你理解，于是你会觉得自己已经看完了整本《红楼梦》了吗？“展现了封建社会末期的社会全景及其走向灭亡的必然趋势。” 这是曹雪芹写《红楼梦》的初衷吗？还是 AI 大语言模型集合了一些人的共同看法？抑或是，这只不过是 AI 随机排列组合生成出的一段话？
这就触及了一个根本的问题：看书，究竟是为了什么？
如果看书只是为了"获取书中的信息"，对于结构固定、有标准答案的书，用 AI 来为我们总结的确效率高。但与此同时，直接从 AI 获取书中的信息，也剥夺了我们看书的乐趣。
现实不会马上改变，然而书也许滴水穿石，渐渐渗透进我们的记忆，让我们因为认同而转换观看的视角。英语有句话说：“You are
what you eat” ，意思是：你吃什么就会影响你的身体健康。我们也可以说：“You are
what you read。” 你读什么书，就会塑造你成为怎样的人。那么，也许你会反问：如果我根本不看书，难道我就不能说是一个完整的人吗？书籍出版比互联网和 AI 还滞后呢。
AI can summarize everything—do we no longer need to read books?
I Lo-fen
Before the Lunar New Year, while organizing the folders on my computer,
I came across a photo I had taken casually many years ago.
By this July, it will have been exactly twenty years since I moved to
Singapore. In these not-so-short years, I have seen someone reading a book on
the MRT only once—and it was a child. He lowered his head, completely immersed
in a thick book that looked like a novel. I couldn’t resist taking out my phone
to capture that rare scene.
The carriage swayed and rumbled along the tracks. His right leg rested
over his left. The book on his knee did not seem easy to steady with the small
fingers and palm of his right hand. Light from the window behind him fell onto
the pages, dense with English words. He seemed to be drawn into the world of
the book; only when he turned a page did his body move slightly.
That posture felt so familiar to me.
There was a time when I had almost forgotten the feeling of shutting out
the surroundings in a public place and losing myself in a book.
Today, even online searches come with an AI mode. When you look up a
book, AI immediately summarizes its content. For example, if you search for Dream
of the Red Chamber, AI will tell you: “Originally titled The Story of
the Stone, it is the foremost of China’s Four Great Classical Novels,
written by the Qing dynasty author Cao Xueqin. Against the backdrop of the rise
and fall of the Jia, Shi, Wang, and Xue families, the novel portrays the tragic
love and marriage of Jia Baoyu, Lin Daiyu, and Xue Baochai, presenting a
panoramic view of late feudal society and its inevitable decline.”
The summary is concise and well organized—faster than Wikipedia in
helping you grasp the gist. After reading it, would you feel as if you had
finished the entire novel? “Presenting a panoramic view of late feudal society
and its inevitable decline.” Was that truly Cao Xueqin’s original intention in
writing the novel? Or is it a synthesis of commonly held views gathered by a
large language model? Or perhaps it is simply a passage generated through
probabilistic arrangement?
This brings us to a fundamental question: what, exactly, do we read for?
If reading is merely about “obtaining information,” then for books with
fixed structures and standard answers, AI summaries are indeed efficient. Yet
obtaining information directly from AI also deprives us of the pleasure of
reading.
Reading is not simply the visual intake of information or knowledge.
Whether an e-book or a printed book, reading differs greatly from listening to
audio or watching video. In audio, melody and rhythm are prearranged by the
creator; in video, transitions are calculated in advance. Even if we speed up
or slow down playback, we are still receiving a compressed or stretched version
of an already fixed structure.
But with a book? We can skim quickly; we can savor slowly, allowing the
responses arising in our minds to guide how we experience the text.
What is a book? A book is a time and space constructed through language
or images—one that we can enter. Reading is stepping into that time and space
at our own pace. There, we see landscapes we may never witness in this
lifetime; we imagine lives we may never personally experience. There, we
collide with thoughts that transcend boundaries; we resonate with emotions at
the deepest layers of life. We walk through, look around, and come out carrying
something—perhaps something we cannot quite name.
Reality does not change overnight. Yet books may work like water
dripping through stone, gradually permeating memory and shifting our
perspective through identification. There is an English saying: “You are what
you eat,” meaning that what you consume shapes your physical health. We might
also say: “You are what you read.” What you read shapes the kind of person you
become.
Perhaps you would counter: if I do not read books at all, can I not
still be a complete person? After all, publishing seems slower than the
internet and AI.
I do not intend to present reading as something lofty or noble. Whether
to read is a personal choice. What I wish to say is this: reading is a form of
investment with a very low cost of trial and error. In an age of information
overload, we do not necessarily need to read a large number of books. Rather,
we need to know that beyond the constant noise and passive consumption, we can
use the internet and AI to help us find that one book we can flip through in
solitude and feel at peace.
I do not know which book the child on the MRT was reading. But I
remember the way he turned the page—slowly, as if reluctant, as if giving
himself a little more time for the words he had just read to linger a while
longer.
In that gesture, there was something that cannot be summarized.
