Literary award winner says ChatGPT wrote part of her science fiction novel, which jury describes as ‘almost flawless’

The winner of Japan’s most prestigious literary prize has admitted to using ChatGPT to write her novel.

Rie Kudan’s latest novel, “Tokyo-to Dojo-to” (“Sympathy Tower Tokyo”), praised by a judge for being “nearly flawless” and “universally enjoyable,” won the biennial Akutagawa Prize on Wednesday.

Set in futuristic Tokyo, the book revolves around a tall prison tower and the architect’s intolerance towards criminals, with AI being a recurring theme.

The 33-year-old author openly admitted that a small part of the book was written entirely by AI, saying that ChatGPT helped her unlock more potential as a writer and greatly influenced her creative process.

“I actively used generative AI such as ChatGPT when writing this book,” she said at a ceremony after the winner was announced.

“I would say about five percent of the book quoted the AI-generated sentences verbatim.”

Outside of her creative pursuits, Kudan often plays with AI, confiding her innermost thoughts that she can “never talk to anyone else about.”

ChatGPT’s responses sometimes inspired dialogue in the novel, she added.

Going forward, she said she wants to maintain “good relationships” with AI and “unleash my creativity” in tandem with it.

Since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, an easy-to-use AI chatbot that can deliver an essay on demand in seconds, there have been growing concerns about its impact on a range of sectors, including books.

Opinion was divided on social media over Kudan’s unorthodox approach to writing, with skeptics calling it morally questionable and possibly undeserving of the award.

“So she wrote the book by cleverly using AI… Is that talented or not? I don’t know,” someone wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

But others celebrated her ingenuity and the effort she put into experimenting with different clues.

“So this is how the Akutagawa laureate uses ChatGPT – not to slack off, but to ‘unleash creativity,’” wrote another social media user.

Titles that list ChatGPT as co-author have been made available for sale through Amazon’s self-publishing unit, although critics largely agree that the works are of poor quality.

British author Salman Rushdie told a press conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October that someone recently asked an AI writing tool to produce 300 words in his style.

“And what came out was absolute garbage,” the “Midnight’s Children” writer said, to laughter from the audience.

The technology also raises a host of potential legal issues.

Last year, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” author George RR Martin were among a number of writers who filed a class-action lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement.

Along with the Authors Guild, they accused the California-based company of using their books “without permission” to train ChatGPT’s large language models, algorithms capable of producing human-sounding text responses based on simple questions, the lawsuit said.