In contemporary science fiction, the digital self born through mind uploading frequently appears as a distinct type of disembodied posthuman. These entities retain consciousness while being severed from their biological bodies, leaving their status as “life” ambiguous. This paper focuses on such uploaded individuals and examines their life potential and paradoxes from a posthumanist perspective. It argues that the continuity of memory, emotional responsiveness, and social functionality grants these uploaded beings a semblance of life. However, due to their radical state of disembodiment, they lack embodied perception, self-sustaining capacity, and the potential for growth—traits typically essential to living beings. This tension reveals a shifting ontological boundary of life under technological transformation and challenges the embodied premise embedded in classical life definitions. Drawing on posthumanist discourse and embodied cognition theory, the paper conceptualizes these uploaded minds as a form of “simulated life”: neither fully organic nor entirely artificial, but a novel mode of existence that urges us to rethink the boundaries of both life and humanity in the posthuman era.

While western science fiction works are looking up to the future and displaying themes such as cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and exploration of the universe, some Chinese science fiction works are also looking at the present, and have revived the traditional literary form of fable by taking all kinds of animals as their objects, which not only extends the science fiction works to the future, but also has a deep and solid metaphor of the reality as the foundation, and thus also reflects the inheritance of Chinese science fiction to the tradition of ‘trusting objects to speak of their will’ in classical literature, and thus makes a unique contribution to the global future imaginations. ‘This also reflects the inheritance of Chinese science fiction from the allegorical writing of classical literature, and thus makes a unique contribution to the global future imagination. Therefore, this paper will discuss animal symbols, man and animals, and man and nature at three levels, and summarise the national characteristics and literary styles of animal fables in Chinese science fiction works in comparison with Western science fiction literature.

The rise of AI-generated literary creation (AIGC) is set to play a transformative role in the future of literature, art, and cultural production. However, as AIGC evolves through the integration of advanced technologies like GANs, CLIP, Transformers, Diffusion, and multimodal technologies, its rapid development raises significant questions. With each iteration, AI improves itself through better algorithms, expanded data sets, and refined models, leading to the increasing potential for human writers to be replaced by specialized AIGC language models. As AI grows more sophisticated, it could outpace human capacity, leading to a potential imbalance where humans are seen as “weaker” in comparison. In this context, we must critically examine the creative potential of AIGC, establish ethical frameworks to regulate its literary impact, and ensure that AI remains a tool that serves human authors rather than eclipsing them.

The rapid evolution of virtual production and AI technologies has significantly transformed traditional filmmaking processes, unlocking new creative potentials that were once constrained by the limitations of analog filmmaking. By introducing efficiencies across preproduction, production, and postproduction, these advancements enable filmmakers to explore a more fluid, dynamic approach to storytelling. In particular, virtual production blurs the boundaries between stages of filmmaking, often compressing or reordering workflows in ways that invite unconventional creative practices. AI-driven tools, such as real-time 3D background generation, further accelerate this process, offering filmmakers the ability to visualize and iterate concepts with unprecedented speed and ease.

This paper explores how these new creative workflows bear striking similarities to the development process of independently published comic books. Both mediums, through technological advancements, open up new forms of discovery and experimentation that were previously unattainable in traditional creative pipelines. The concept of "creative fungibility"—the ability to rapidly adapt and rework creative elements in response to new insights—emerges as a key theme in this comparison. Just as comic book creators often pivot between various stages of writing, drawing, and layout without rigid barriers, virtual production and AI allow filmmakers to engage in a similar cycle of continuous discovery. By analyzing the parallels between comic book creation and virtual production workflows, this paper will demonstrate how these emerging technologies offer an intelligent, adaptive framework that redefines the creative process across media.