A Conversation with Zhang Chu: "AI Is Still Shallow Waters Full of Pretenders, But I Want to Make an Animated Film With It"

By Antony | Produced by AI Nao

01

By chance, I got to sit down and chat with Zhang Chu. Yes, that Zhang Chu — the one who sang "Sister."

"Sister" was a song Zhang Chu wrote at 26. It's 2026 now. Thirty-odd years is enough for a baby to grow into middle age, and enough for the world to go from analog signals to the AI era. The rock singer who once seared his way into a generation's hearts with raw passion sat before me, and today the label he gives himself is: Zhang Chu the engineering student.

Zhang Chu's cat, Ellie, ten years old, still darts around me with the energy of a kitten. We didn't talk about the fury and rebellion of rock. Instead we talked about the physicality of space, the structure of rationality. About his enthusiasm for technology, and why this era still hasn't produced the AI he wants — one that can write good music.

The conversation slid in a direction I never could have predicted.

Zhang Chu performing

In Conversation with Zhang Chu

Part 01

Spring at Beijing 101 High and Qingdao No. 4 Middle School

AI Writes Everything the Same Now

AI Nao: In 2025, what did you spend the most time on? Not thinking or meditating — actual doing.

Zhang Chu: I rearranged my two albums from the '90s — Shameful Being Lonely and The Airplane Factory.

Then did some performances, recorded a podcast. That's about it.

AI Nao: Rearranging two classics — was that nostalgia, or did you feel the original expression doesn't hold up today?

Zhang Chu: The rearrangement was about introducing a physical sense of space. I felt the musical space in those two albums could be more rationalized.

I used to be a very感性-minded person, but I came to feel that rationality is more universal and foundational on a global scale. The environment we had before tended to make people excessively感性.

I'll give you an example — you'll see Europeans' bookshelves packed with nonfiction, whereas for us it used to be mostly fiction. Now I want to look at the world with a nonfiction attitude.

AI Nao: How long did this take, and what tools do you use for rearranging now?

Zhang Chu: About three months. I've always arranged on computer — Logic Pro, everyone uses it. These tools are all very mature.

AI Nao: You pursue rationality and physical space — so in your current workflow, have you tried AI tools that generate based on mathematical logic? Like Suno or Udio?

Zhang Chu: I've tried them. I've been testing Suno constantly, but I find it pretty awful — everything it gives you is second-rate.

I think the AI tools available now are aesthetically developed by second-rate engineers. These big companies should be impressive — are they withholding some top-tier data?

Anyway, my friends and I have tried software domestic and abroad, and they all produce second-rate stuff. The leaps in melody, the arrangement of harmonies — these can all be analyzed, but right now AI gives you something too flat.

AI Nao: What do you mean by this "second-rate" quality? Does it still not sound human-written?

Zhang Chu: It's not about sounding human or not. My feeling is: nature has so many real flowers as samples, but what it delivers is always a lump of paper flowers.

The combinations of harmonies and modes in music follow strict patterns. Real musicians all understand this logic — you can apply it freely within the rules.

Say I want to make a Beethoven-style classical quartet, or jazz in a specific mode. I give you a few tonic notes, define the melodic contour. Logically, AI should play circles around me in this framework.

AI Nao: But it hasn't shown this kind of logical dominance.

Zhang Chu: It can't. The feedback it gives is extremely rigid — the product of an extremely flattened database.

Like I said, there should be so much good data there, but the aesthetic level it ends up presenting is like an extremely crude paper flower from a rural market fair.

I don't think it's absorbed top-tier data to engage at higher dimensions. It's just repeating at an extremely shallow level.

AI Nao: Has there ever been a moment — say you've written most of a song, but you're stuck on one or two bars of melody. Would you feed the surrounding sections to AI and ask it to fill in?

Zhang Chu: I really haven't tried that. When I compose myself, this situation doesn't arise.

AI Nao: Very show-offy. Because the melody just flows naturally in your mind?

Zhang Chu: Once the harmony is built, it (the melody) should naturally be there. In the end it comes down to whether you have talent — if you do, you can construct it.

AI Nao: So in your view, current AI hasn't even grazed the edge of talent in music creation, and doesn't qualify as your assistant.

Zhang Chu: Just look at this era. In Steve Jobs's time, there were people who looked at problems with depth and openness, and products quickly gained vitality. But not now.

AI Nao: You feel this era has a bunch of mediocre developers piling stuff into AI.

Zhang Chu: Or many companies making products for their own moats, but it doesn't constitute evolution.

In other words, shallow waters, many turtles. They want the water shallow so everyone can come in and play, and everyone who comes in is a turtle.

AI Nao: In tech circles, we call this the democratization of creation that AI brings...

Zhang Chu: You construct a melody, you want to express the feeling of spring, the state of a person falling — a person falling like in a cartoon, it has its own logical beauty in itself. But spring at Beijing 101 High School and spring at Qingdao No. 4 Middle School — their beauty is different. The wind where you are and the wind in Qingdao, they don't blow with the same force.

AI right now writes the wind here and there the same way.

AI Nao: 😂 Your standards for AI are too high.

Zhang Chu: If these products serve individuals, they need to be able to express that person's specific lived environment.

But what they give you now are data packages stripped of concrete life experience.

AI Nao: And with AI creation you often go straight to the result — whether music or video, it skips the thinking and debugging process that would be most agonizing and torturous for you.

Does this process-less experience worry you?

Zhang Chu: I call this the "LSD quasi-world" (note: LSD is a powerful hallucinogen).

LSD is surreal — it simplifies the physiological logical process, lets people reach excitement without doing anything. Look at society today — to a large degree it's an LSD state: you order a meal and it arrives immediately, buy clothes and they're in your hands immediately. It's all very LSD-like.

AI Nao: In the future it might be even more so — directly simplifying away all of life's processes.

Zhang Chu: I particularly hate that.

The world gives you one thread, but I don't like following that thread to change. I have to add a thread in there. You know what I mean? Otherwise I'm trapped in LSD.

Even if what I add is zero, I have to add it. This is what fits the definition of human. This is human divinity.

After this chat, Zhang Chu sent me several clips he made with AI. I picked one to include here.

Part 02

My Least Favorite Word Is "Underground"

AI Nao: Do you still hang out with your old rock friends from back in the day? Like Dou Wei and them?

Zhang Chu: No contact with Dou Wei. Everyone's generally out of touch — people go down very different paths, everyone follows their own experience.

Some people, like Gao Qi, I still see and can keep chatting with, because we have relatively similar rational elements, I suppose.

AI Nao: You started a podcast, I heard you just did a conversation with Jiang Xin.

Zhang Chu: Right. But sometimes I really do find the male-female difference is too great.

AI Nao: Different topics of concern? When you were young everyone could hang out together.

Zhang Chu: Women tend to need more emotional things. Men, after growing up...

AI Nao: Unwilling to provide.

Zhang Chu: Right. Hahaha.

AI Nao: Does Gao Yuan still take photos for you?

Zhang Chu: No. Last time she went to Jingdezhen, I asked her what's fun there. She said there are many nameless craftsmen there, lots of porcelain has no names.

I couldn't continue that conversation.

AI Nao: You found it a bit empty.

Zhang Chu: Now I prefer conversing with people who have expertise — that kind of dialogue has support, and with support it can continue. That文艺青年 type is half-understanding, you don't know what to say in response.

AI Nao: I can sense you're struggling to break free from the identity of Zhang Chu of the Three Princes of Móyán, from Zhang Chu the rock singer of that era.

Zhang Chu: I think people can't just love abstract things, love those concepts. You can also see what fellow travelers ended up doing later. Some couldn't make money, some just went with the flow, some kept themselves in a constant state of tension.

I later spent a lot of time filtering out these distractions.

AI Nao: If you could say something to yourself 30 years ago — the you from the year of the Hong Kong Coliseum concert — what would you say?

Zhang Chu: I'm someone who empathizes with others too easily... I think young people still need to bravely do things with systems.

Bravery is a primal, vital, luminous thing. But without systems it's not enough either.

AI Nao: Braver and more systematic in being yourself — meaning more persistently following your inner path in creation, ignoring the outside world?

Zhang Chu: At least don't let yourself be carried along by those concepts of the time. For example, my least favorite word is "underground." Those Japanese post-'70s kids doing metal in the park — they don't call themselves underground. But here, some people just love forcibly creating a value differential, everything has to have a label planted first, a flag raised.

To me, this approach is actually quite急功近利. Everyone hides in a fabricated sense of superiority and dithers — this doesn't constitute evolution.

AI Nao: So now you position yourself as Zhang Chu the engineering student, emphasizing rationality — all to detach more thoroughly from those big words.

Zhang Chu: I think people still need to love the beautiful, powerful parts of their own lives. Because a person is a physical body — you still need to make yourself strong. You can't let this era's support for "appreciating ugliness," or fitting some concept, make you insist on making yourself sickly — that's no fun.

You still need to love those concrete, vital things, not love abstract concepts, those big words.

Zhang Chu's cat Ellie

Part 03

This Year I Want to Use AI to Make My Animation

AI Nao: I listened to your podcast Apollo and Dionysus — the latest episode was you and Wang Ziru chatting, such an unexpected guest.

Zhang Chu: I really like watching tech reviews. I especially like watching someone sit there talking about all kinds of new tech, including those instruments, effects pedals and such.

I really like Wang Ziru's energy — he still has that youthful impulse, though in a complex value system there are things he probably can't quite figure out either.

AI Nao: You could record effects pedal reviews yourself, music fans would definitely want to watch.

Zhang Chu: Yes, I could do that too.

AI Nao: So in all of tech history, who do you most admire? Or whose system most attracts you?

Zhang Chu: I used to quite like Elon Musk, because he was still quite first-principles. But I don't like him as much now. (Why?) For example, when he dropped his Starlink down to China's orbital range, it started conflicting with China (note: refers to Starlink satellites approaching China's space station on two occasions). It feels like this person is more profit-driven, not as purely tech-first as he said in his early days.

I'm a die-hard Steve Jobs fan. I was using Apple computers in 2000. Back then if you went to Zhongguancun, the Apple store was tiny, basically nobody knew where it was.

AI Nao: Why Jobs?

Zhang Chu: Because Apple already had composition software on it back then. They really were the company that earliest assembled vital things, driving this vitality forward in exploration.

Many other companies are the opposite of Apple — they don't care about vitality, they want immediate profit, they want what's ready-made.

AI Nao: Bought any good tech products recently?

Zhang Chu: I bought a NIO, the EC6.

AI Nao: Drives well?

Zhang Chu: Drives quite well, though I crashed it, just got it fixed. I believe China definitely has a batch of tech people with ideals, who really have a tech dream, guided by ideals not just by real-world interests.

I hope they keep at it properly, don't get led astray by some crooked stuff.

AI Nao: Your underlying values haven't changed from your twenties — you're still 100% convinced people should be guided by ideals.

Zhang Chu: Of course. It has to be this way.

AI Nao: Where do you plan to spend your time in 2026?

Zhang Chu: I want to make an animation. Actually I've been thinking about this for nearly 10 years.

AI Nao: Why animation?

Zhang Chu: Because some things I want to express can't be fully said in a song. I want to explore a state, existential questions, about human awakening outside social structures.

I've watched European animation for a long time — a lot of French, British, Spanish animation in terms of art and narrative. Because they've been through Enlightenment and rationality, their understanding of the individual is more complete. Their animation has a structure, not just driven by emotion. Some French post-'90s animators — their work is plain, tense, very clear, also sought-after in Japan. I like Japanese animation too — what they're great at is making art serve society, that's very rational.

I want to express loneliness as existence. In common Eastern expressions — like in Jia Zhangke's films or our other literary works — loneliness is more a social-structural loneliness. People's loneliness comes from their detachment from social structure, from emotional detachment. You're lonely because you're not understood, not accepted. This loneliness carries confrontation and struggle.

AI Nao: The loneliness you understand isn't confrontation, it's a mode of existence.

Zhang Chu: Right, existential loneliness. Something like Luc Besson's The Big Blue — a person facing the ocean, he's not lonely because he lost some social relationship, but because as an individual living being, he fundamentally needs to face this relationship between himself and the universe.

This loneliness doesn't have so much dramatized suffering. It's more peaceful, with a kind of self-dignity. Here the person is coexisting with their own nature, their own good and bad, right and wrong, fulfilling their own fate.

AI Nao: How long do you plan to take to make this animation?

Zhang Chu: I hope this year. Because I've always wanted to do it myself, and I've been looking at what good applications are out there.

AI Nao: Quite a few AI animation and video generation products came out this year, I'll send you some to try.

Zhang Chu: That would be great, send them over.

Postscript

After our chat, I sent Zhang Chu a few AI animation and video generation products, including Oiioii and Medeo. A day later, he sent back a few generated samples:

"Used them, really good"

Image sources | Provided by interview subject, author photography, Dreamina AI-generated

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