These new AI features on WeChat are killing the last shred of humanity left in Moments.

Today, I want to talk about a few new AI features that WeChat has recently rolled out based on Xiaowei.

To be honest, I really think the last bit of human warmth left in Moments might be gone.

The first one is an AI feature currently in beta testing within Moments — AI-assisted writing (AI帮写).

Yesterday, I happened to attend Fliggy’s launch event and took some photos. In the evening, I wanted to post a Moments update.

That’s when I noticed a new feature in the bottom-right corner — AI-assisted writing. When I tapped it, it generated three Moments posts based on my photos and the text I’d already written. I could pick one and post it directly.

The moment I saw this feature, I had a bad feeling.

Although Moments is indeed not what it used to be, it’s still one of the few places where I feel people can genuinely express themselves — where they can share something slightly private, slightly real.

Those traces of people living their lives — those clouds, those breezes, those moments of struggling to articulate our own feelings — they’re truly beautiful.

But when you shove AI into such a prominent, such an aggressive position, the entire atmosphere of Moments starts to feel… not great.

Then I came across the second feature.

AI commenting (AI点评).

When you long-press on someone’s text in Moments, there’s now an additional option — AI commenting.

Tap it, and you’ll see AI’s evaluation of that Moments update. At the same time, it can quickly help you write a comment.

When I saw these two features combined, I honestly felt a little disappointed today.

I really dislike these two updates. I dislike both of these features.

Some people might say, “You don’t like it? Who do you think you are? As long as the masses like it, that’s what matters.”

I know. But I still want to say this: I don’t like them, and I hope these features never get a full rollout. On April 19, 2012, Moments launched alongside WeChat 4.0.

Its tagline read:

Record your life in the photo album.

At the same time, share photos to Moments so that all your contacts can see them.

If I had to evaluate the philosophy behind the early Moments, I think a tagline from one of today’s apps captures it perfectly:

Record the good life.

The earliest version of Moments didn’t even allow you to post pure text — only photos and links.

This was because WeChat believed that the phone accompanied people into the real world. When a user saw a beautiful sunset or encountered something interesting, they could capture it instantly. What Moments recorded was people’s reactions to their real environment, and the beautiful life they wanted to share.

That’s why the camera icon became the entry point for posting to Moments.

Zhang Xiaolong would later describe it as a town square.

Just like how you walk through a square every day and see acquaintances chatting in small groups.

So you slow down, stop to chat with them for a bit, give a like as a greeting, or simply glance over and keep walking.

That was the Moments of back then. That is the Moments in my heart.

But with the addition of these two AI features, the very nature of Moments seems to have changed.

On one end of Moments, AI is recording a beautiful life on behalf of one person.

On the other end, AI is conducting beautiful social interactions on behalf of another person.

This once-lively square now has fewer and fewer humans, and more and more fakeness.

In the end, all that’s left is a group of agents, carrying out one distorted social interaction after another for their masters, all across a single Moments post.

Many people believe that in social relationships, the words you write and the things you say are the content itself.

But I want to say — that’s never been true. In social relationships, the source itself is the real content.

It’s like a love letter we hand to someone.

Even if I know it’s written roughly, written poorly, the fact that I wrote it by hand — the recipient can still feel my sincerity.

Of course, you could also generate a love letter with AI. It would certainly be more seductive, more eloquent.

But if the other person finds out you used AI to generate it, I imagine they’d only say:

“Bro, you used AI to write a love letter? Are you out of your mind?”

Since 2023, I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I’ve expressed it publicly many times: in the age of AI, everything related to efficiency will be disrupted by AI. Only the relationships between people and the genuine connections between them remain eternal constants.

Including the company I run now, Xushi Media (虚实传媒). Many people might not know our mission and vision.

I think it’s okay to express this here, with a bit of embarrassment: We hope to connect everything in the AI era, and we also hope to become the most valuable connection network in the AI era.

So, what I really want to say is: in human relationships, some inefficiencies are the unit of measurement for sincerity.

Any AI tool can build features like AI-assisted writing or AI commenting. But this is Moments. I believe Moments absolutely must not build these features itself — it’s essentially a signal that says:

WeChat Moments now encourages AI-generated content.

The message this signal sends is terrifying. It even shatters the fundamental tone that Moments established back in 2012.

Looking at the product data, things might even look better.

More people posting to Moments, more people commenting, more interactions.

But the most dangerous kind of success for a social product might be this: the interaction metrics get prettier and prettier, while we ourselves gradually disappear from the interactions.

Besides Moments, there’s actually another AI feature that I don’t quite know how to describe — and this one hits me even harder, because it’s directly connected to me personally.

When you open Official Accounts, you might now see Xiaowei appearing directly in the top-left position. And it’s permanently pinned, always staying there.

Tap this feature, and it automatically summarizes recent articles from the Official Accounts you follow.

As a content consumer, of course I know how convenient it is.

I’m bombarded with information every day. With so many updates from the Official Accounts I follow, I can’t be bothered to read them all. I just want to know roughly what they’re about.

But I’m also a creator within WeChat’s content ecosystem.

To write my own content and maintain my posting frequency, I’ve pulled countless all-nighters, just to keep writing. Many of my friends know that during the day, I have to handle company matters and countless business tasks. These articles — I basically only have time to write them after 11 PM. If they’re more demanding, I might write straight through until 8 AM and still not finish, only publishing around 9-something. Even when I write quickly, I’m still up until 3 or 4 in the morning.

Kobe once said, “Have you ever seen Los Angeles at 4 AM?” I’d say — for the past year, I’ve seen Beijing at 5 AM almost every single day.

When I see content I’ve worked so hard to write being pre-digested into an AI summary for users to screen before they even read it… that feeling is still a bit disappointing and sorrowful.

Previously, putting an AI summary in the menu bar on an article’s detail page — that I could understand. Maybe I just write badly, people don’t finish reading, and AI provides a summary. That one, I accept.

But now, you’ve elevated AI summaries to such a prominent level. It’s as if you’re afraid people won’t use AI summaries, so you’re shoving this feature down everyone’s throat.

I don’t know how to express my disappointment.

The content we create seems meaningless now. Every word we write by hand — since everyone’s being encouraged to have it summarized away by AI anyway — will eventually become that condensed few-dozen-to-hundred-word summary.

So where’s the meaning in creating content?

Is it just to wind up as an AI summary in the end?

You have to understand: content consumption used to be a two-way street. I create, you consume.

But now, AI has been elevated to such a high status, granted rights it never had before. It decides for readers what’s important in an article, what can be cut, and what deserves to be seen.

Could that, in turn, end up influencing creators in reverse — making them write only to have their viewpoints more easily extracted, their paragraphs more standardized, everything more easily recommended by AI? Would this become a new generation of clickbait?

I don’t know.

I just feel that WeChat was meant to bring people closer together.

So why does it feel like AI and humans are drifting further apart?

Between humans, there used to be just a wall called a screen. But now, that wall has become an agent — taller than a mountain, wider than a sea.

Yet between people, there seems to be no people left anymore.

In The Wandering Earth 2, there’s a very famous line:

“A civilization without people is meaningless.”

I still love AI.

I also love creating.

I can honestly say — without AI, I’d be a useless burden.

But there’s a very clear line I’ve always held in my heart.

AI can help me research, write code, and handle work, amplifying my abilities to levels I never could have imagined in the past.

But human relationships, human communication, the genuine emotions between people — I don’t want to hand those over to it.

It can help me become a stronger person.

But it cannot replace me in being a person.

Many years ago, when beauty filters first emerged.

At first, we just wanted to smooth away a pimple, brighten our skin tone a little.

Later, eyes got bigger, chins got sharper, skin got more flawless.

Everyone in photos became more beautiful. Everyone became more perfect.

But was that the real us?

AI can help us reach further places.

But please don’t let it reach each other for us.

I hope that many years from now, when I open Moments again, I’ll still see a friend post a blurry photo of a cloud.

And they’ll say:

“The sky is really beautiful today.”

No ornate rhetoric. No profound insights. No AI to summarize the meaning of the moment for them.

But I’ll know — that moment, they really did look up at the sky.

And they really did want to share that cloud with me.