Prize-winning Japanese author Rie Kudan admits to using AI

One of Japan’s most famous and prestigious literary prizes has been won by a novel ­that was partially composed using artificial ­intelligence.

Author Rie Kudan, who was awarded the Akutagawa Prize. She said one twentieth of The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy was generated by the AI chatbot program ChatGPT.

One of Japan’s most famous and prestigious literary prizes has been won by a novel ­that was partially composed using artificial ­intelligence.

At the ceremony on Wednesday night to award the Akutagawa Prize, the winning author, Rie Kudan, said that one twentieth of her novel, The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy, was generated by the AI chatbot program ChatGPT.

The prize, awarded twice a year to new writers, is named after the early 20th century novelist, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy is set in an alternate near future in which AI plays a central part in human society.

It tells the story of a female architect, Sara Makina, and Takuto, a young man who is writing her biography. Makina designs a tower in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Gyoen park intended for the compassionate rehabilitation of criminals, but her own intolerance causes her to have misgivings about the project.

“The work is flawless and it’s difficult to find any faults,” said Shuichi Yoshida, a member of the judging committee. “It is a highly entertaining and interesting work that prompts debate about how to consider it.”

One of the themes of the book is the way that “soft and fuzzy words” muddle ideas about justice, and it is to reproduce these that Kudan turned to ChatGPT.

“In recent years, we find ourselves in a situation in which words have expanded without limit, and permitted unlimited interpretations,” Kudan said after her award. “I want to use the words with care, and to think about the positive and negative aspects of language.”

ChatGPT produces convincingly fluent, although frequently vapid, short essays, stories and poems on subjects specified by the user. Its emergence has provoked anxiety about the extent to which it will render traditional creators, including journalists and authors, redundant, and the way in which its algorithms draw on the original work of others.

In 2023 in the US, a group of 17 writers, including Jonathan Franzen, George RR Martin and John Grisham, launched a class-action suit against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, for “mass-scale copyright infringement”.

The plaintiffs claim that their books have been “fed” into the ChatGPT algorithms to train the AI and enable it to create texts based on their writing. The Authors Guild, which organised the action, warned AI could “decimate” the writing profession.

The Times