Focus on Arts and Ecology

Rie Kudan was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and promptly announced that she used ChatGPT to write about 5 percent of the winning novel. 

By Jordan Pearson. 19 January 2024

Rie Kudan, the 33-year-old winner of Japan’s top prize for literature, revealed on Wednesday that she used ChatGPT to write a portion of her book. 

Kudan won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize this week for her sci-fi novel Tokyo-to Dojo-to (Tokyo Sympathy Tower), which centers around a high-rise prison tower and contains themes surrounding AI. Judges reportedly called Kudan’s novel “almost flawless.”

The Akutagawa Prize is Japan’s top prize for pure literature, and is awarded semiannually to emerging writers. The related Naoki Prize goes to established authors of popular fiction. It’s a huge deal, and the winners of these prestigious awards typically receive tremendous amounts of media attention.

In her acceptance speech, Kudan revealed that a portion of the book had been written by ChatGPT. “This is a novel written by making full use of a generative AI like ChatGPT, and probably about 5 percent of the whole text is written directly from the generative AI,” Kudan said, according to The Japan Times. “I would like to work well with them to express my creativity.’"

The Japan Times reported Friday that the reaction on social media was swift and harsh, with many commenters expressing concern about what the future of literature will be if AI is allowed to compete for top awards. The use of generative AI in creative fields is still highly controversial, in part because such systems are trained on a massive corpus of other authors’ work. AI systems are known to regurgitate texts they were trained on wholesale, including personal information from real people scraped from the internet.

Some observer noted that Kudan's book contains sections that are meant to be responses generated by an AI, and argued that if ChatGPT was responsible for those portions of the book, that would be more defensible. Kudan's publisher did not respond to a request for comment sent by The Japan Times.

(Sources: Vice)