THE MESSENGER
AJapanese author who won one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards for her novel — in which artificial intelligence played a central role — revealed that an AI chatbot wrote part of the book.
Rie Kudan’s novel, “The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy” (“Tokyo-to Dojo-to”), took home the Akutagawa Prize on Wednesday, with judges lauding the book as “flawless,” according to The Times.
After the ceremony, Kudan admitted that around 5% of her novel had been “quoted verbatim” from sentences generated by ChatGPT.
“I made active use of generative AI like ChatGPT in writing this book,” Kudan said at a ceremony after receiving the award, per AFP.
The novel centers around a female architect in an alternate near future in which AI has become a central and integral part of daily life. Kudan said she turned to ChatGPT to reproduce the way “soft and fuzzy words” blur ideas about justice, The Times reported.
“In recent years, we find ourselves in a situation in which words have expanded without limit, and permitted unlimited interpretations,” Kudan said. “I want to use the words with care, and to think about the positive and negative aspects of language.”
Social media users were divided over Kudan’s use of the chatbot to produce portions of the novel.
“I wonder: was this legitimate, creative use of AI?” one user wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Kudan said she plans to keep “good relationships” with AI and use it to “unleash my creativity,” per AFP.
