Rie Kudan, the 17th winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, has admitted that she used ChatGPT to help write her novel. A deserving winner?
ADVERTISEMENTRie Kudan, the winner of Japan's most prestigious literary prize, has explained that part of her new book has a unique ghostwriter: ChatGPT.
The 33-year-old author, whose latest novel "Tokyo-to Dojo-to" wowed the Akutagawa jury, who found it "so perfect that it is difficult to find fault with it", revealed at the prize giving ceremony that she had "used the full potential of AI to write this book.”
She explained that "around 5% of the book is made up of sentences generated by AI", quoted word for word.
The author confessed that conversing frequently with the AI allowed her to confide her most intimate thoughts, which she "can't talk about with anyone else", before adding that ChatGPT 's responses sometimes inspired dialogue in the novel.
Kudan’s novel is set in an imagined near future where AI has become an integral part of daily life. It follows the story of an architect who builds a tower in a Tokyo park designed to offer a place where criminals are rehabilitated and explores her discomfort with society’s tolerance towards those who break the law.
Kudan believes that the generative artificial intelligence software has helped her to unleash her creative potential, and said that she wanted to maintain a "good relationship" with the AI.
However, not everyone is so keen on the news and this particular creative unleashing, with many labelling this practice morally questionable and wondering whether Kudan deserved the coveted Japanese prize.
"So she wrote a book by skilfully using AI... Is that talent? I don't know," wrote one user on X.
The Akutagawa Prize organisation has yet to comment on the winner's statements.
The AI tool ChatGPT was launched in 2022, and can write texts on demand in a matter of seconds. It is causing concern in various sectors, with many figures in the cultural world denouncing it as the death of “real art” and labelling it as “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human.”
Recently, British author Salman Rushdie said that a short text generated in his own style by an artificial intelligence was “pure garbage".
Sentiments shared by John Grisham and "Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin, who were among several writers who filed a 2023 class-action lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI over alleged copyright violation.
Also last year, an artist turned down their prize from the Sony World Photography Awards because their prize-winning photograph wasn’t actually a photograph at all, but rather a digital image made using the AI program DALL-E 2.
