A novel created with the help of ChatGPT won a literary award! Recently, 33-year-old Japanese writer Rie Kudan won Japan's top literary award, the "Akutagawa Prize", for his self-written novel. The winning book is titled "Tokyo-toDojo-to/TokyoSympathyTower", which tells the story of a towering prison tower around AI and was officially published on January 17.

On the awards stage, Kudan revealed that ChatGPT participated in about 5% of the creation of this science fiction novel.

The judges unanimously rated this novel as "almost flawless"!


You know, the Akutagawa Prize is Japan's top prize in the field of pure literature, awarded every six months to emerging writers. Prestigious winners typically receive significant media attention.

However, is using ChatGPT to participate in the creation of creative content really something worth encouraging?

ChatGPT assisted in writing a book and won the top literary award

In his acceptance speech, Rie Kudan said that generative AI helped him unleash his potential.


She regards AI as a source of inspiration and a companion in her creative process.

Outside of creation, Kudan often communicates with AI, pouring out her inner thoughts that she “can’t talk about with anyone else.”


An ITMedia article shows a page in the book where the fictional AI appears, and gives a templated AI response (the ellipsis is the complete sentence that was cut off in the photo):

Sara: Did you know you are illiterate?

AI-built: No, I'm a text-based data processing AI model, so I'm not. Furthermore, "illiteracy" is a discriminatory expression that carries an insult or contempt. Due to this... possibility, use should be avoided. Use this word…so as not to appear dismissive or disrespectful…Increase literacy…


The Japan Times reported that many commentators expressed concerns about what the future of literature would look like if AI were allowed to compete for top prizes.


Controversy remains over the use of generative AI in creative fields, as these systems are trained on large corpora of other authors' work.

AI systems are known to copy the texts they have been trained on, including personal information about real people scraped from the Internet.


You know, writing with ChatGPT will also face a series of potential legal issues.

Last year, several authors sued OpenAI for copyright infringement by using their works in data for training models.

For example, writer George RR Martin, famous for writing "A Song of Ice and Fire", filed a lawsuit against OpenAI.

Last October, British novelist Salman Rushdie, who wrote "Midnight's Children," said at a press conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair that someone recently asked an AI writing tool to write 300 words in his style.

"It's all rubbish," he said with a laugh.

AI won the grand prize not just once

I still remember that in 2022, a work generated by a foreign brother using the AI ​​painting tool Midjourney won first place in the art competition at the Colorado State Fair in the United States.

Below, the painting is titled "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial."

Jason Allen, the creator of the award-winning painting, said that he adjusted the input prompt words many times and used Midjourney to generate more than 100 paintings.

After several weeks of revision and selection, the three most satisfactory works were selected, post-processed using Photoshop, enlarged and printed on canvas using Gigapixel AI.


As soon as the results were announced, human painters went crazy and expressed doubts about it.


Faced with overwhelming doubts after winning the award, Allen further explained that when he submitted his work, he had already marked "Jason Allen via Midjourney" in the author column.


The reality is, there are countless examples of this.

In October last year, "Twin Sisters in Love", a strange black and white photo of two women hugging an octopus tightly, won the first SPOSTAR International Artificial Intelligence Award.

The photographer behind it, Annika Nordenskiöld, captured this extraordinary scene through Midjourney.

Nordenskiöld said when accepting the award, "I understand the fear that artificial intelligence brings to us, but in my opinion, this is more like one of my colleagues."


In December last year, Tsinghua University professor Shen Yang’s short story “The Land of Machine Memories” created using AI won the second prize in the Jiangsu Youth Popular Science Science Fiction Competition.

It is worth mentioning that 100% of the content in this book is written by AI, from pen names, titles, text to illustrations.

It took him 3 hours and 66 rounds of dialogue with the AI ​​to obtain the content. Only one of the six judges saw that this was content created by AI.