SHENZHEN, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) -- As darkness fell over China's southern tech hub of Shenzhen, a city known for breakneck innovation, a classroom flickered to life. Inside, a rather different awakening was brewing.
Lyu Pinghuang, 65, arrived 20 minutes early for this class, as she always does. Together with a lively group of other retirees, Lyu was there to learn more about artificial intelligence.
This evening's lesson focused on how to bring vintage photographs to life by using AI. A total of 22 elderly students, their silver hair illuminated by smartphone screens, had gathered to find out more about Jimeng, a Midjourney-like AI tool developed by ByteDance that can transform faded, blurred or damaged old pictures into crystal clear images, and which is even able to make these images "move."
The class followed the instructions of teacher Meng Chuanming, who said: "Please remove the scratches from this photograph." The students listened and their responses resulted in magical transformations unfolding on their screens. The classroom immediately erupted in animated chatter, as desk partners leaned together, eagerly displaying much clearer portraits of their younger selves to one another.
Chen Chongxi, 68, emerged as the undisputed "top student" in this class. Many others were still struggling to repair their monochrome memories, at a time when Chen had already succeeded in adding colour to his photographs.
While Silicon Valley tends to fixate on teenage prodigies and venture capitalists chasing the next unicorn, this sprawling metropolis of 18 million in Guangdong Province has opened a rather unexpected front in the AI wars by teaching grandpas and grandmas to prompt engineer.
For these elders, AI has become a tool very handy for storytelling, memory-keeping and quiet reconnection in honoring personal histories, in a city often obsessed with the new.
Relocated from central China's Hubei Province to help raise her grandson, Lyu found herself adrift in Shenzhen's relentless modernity, until she heard about a free AI class offered at a local community center. "I started as the most confused person in the room," she recounted.
Though understanding little, Lyu sensed something profound: "This is cutting-edge and represents the trend of our era." Without hesitation, she enrolled in the full program, one of the city's extraordinary experiments in technological democracy.
Lyu still vividly remembers her first AI class: "It was mostly 30-somethings. I was the only retiree, completely out of place." While others kept pace effortlessly, she couldn't even locate where to type her commands.
From then on, she has travelled across Shenzhen for similar AI courses: Mondays in Futian district, Wednesdays in Nanshan district and the following week in distant Pingshan. From "text-to-text" to "text-to-image" to "text-to-video," Lyu learned these knowhows step by step. "AI has made my life richer and happier," said Lyu.
In recent years, such an educational movement has taken root in the city's neighborhoods. Today, 625 communities host these courses, comprising more than 5,000 distinct classes and 8,000 sessions -- altogether training over 400,000 residents. Increasingly, the faces in such classrooms are those of silver-haired pioneers, eager to master the language of intelligent machines.
The AI night school Lyu attended this evening was launched in June 2024, and has since mobilized a network of more than 200 volunteer instructors. Its founder, Jiang Changqiu, recalled a surge of interest when DeepSeek captured the public's imagination in February 2025, prompting the school to run a record fifteen classes in a single day.
In the hands of elderly learners, technology sheds its coldness, becoming instead a companion, a canvas and a key to timeless curiosity.
"With AI, we're no longer trapped in life's trivialities and mindless short videos. Instead, we devote more time to learning, and that's incredibly beneficial for the elderly," said Chen. "AI brings us old folks back to youth."
AI night schools transform frontier technology into a public service right at people's doorsteps, said Han Gangtuan, a political adviser to Shenzhen's Futian district. "This accessible education represents the greatest kindness a city can offer its old citizens."
In a sparkling moment of discovery, one retiree in the classroom directed the system to add a smile to his youthful ID photo, his younger self's grin flashed onto the monitor, mirroring his own. "That was my first work photo," he observed. "And that was the smile I remember." ■
