Prestigious Japanese Literary Award Winner Rie Kudan Admits to Using AI
Author Rie Kudan, after winning Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, has admitted to using ChatGPT to aid her in her work. The novel in question has AI as a featured theme and centers around an architect tasked with building a comfortable high-rise prison in the city of Tokyo with the idea that “criminals are people who deserve sympathy“.
The award that the author won is called the Akutagawa Prize for the best work in fiction by a new writer. For her part, author Rie Kudan is open about her use of AI and plans on continuing to do so. “I plan to continue to profit from the use of AI in the writing of my novels, while letting my creativity express itself to the fullest”.
According to CNN, Rie Kudan confirmed at a press conference that around 5% of her book “The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy”, which committee members called, “practically flawless”, was word-for-word generated by AI.
The story itself is set in a future Japan where a high-rise tower, designed as a comfortable detention facility is built in a park in Shinjuku. It goes on to portray a female architect who designed the tower as she experiences discomfort with the excessively tolerant society and the pervasive presence of generative AI.
What’s interesting is the author’s personal use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In an interview, the author admitted to using the chatbot as a consultant for her problems that she felt she couldn’t share with anyone else. In short, she said, “When the AI did not say what I expected…I sometimes reflected my feelings in the lines of the main character.”
This is an interesting departure from authors in the United States and other parts of the world who are engaging with AI as if the technology is a harmful force to their craft. Earlier last year, authors sued OpenAI, accusing the company of using their work to help train its LLMs without consent.
How authors and others choose to work with AI in the short term will likely determine how it affects the creative field in the long term.
Originally posted on OpenDataScience.com
Read more data science articles on OpenDataScience.com, including tutorials and guides from beginner to advanced levels! Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here and receive the latest news every Thursday. You can also get data science training on-demand wherever you are with our Ai+ Training platform. Interested in attending an ODSC event? Learn more about our upcoming events here.
