(CNN) – After winning one of the country's most prestigious literary awards, Japanese writer Rie Kudan admitted she got help from an unlikely source: ChatGPT.
“I plan to continue benefiting from the use of artificial intelligence in writing my novels while also giving free rein to my creativity,” said the 33-year-old author, who was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for best work of fiction on Wednesday. from a promising new author.
The author then confirmed in a press conference that around 5% of her book “Tokyo Sympathy Tower,” which commission members praised as “virtually error-free,” was generated word for word by artificial intelligence.
The novel revolves around the dilemmas of an architect responsible for building a comfortable high-rise prison in Tokyo where lawbreakers are rehabilitated, and has AI as its main theme.
Kudan says that in his own life, he consulted ChatGPT for problems he felt he couldn't tell anyone about. “When the AI didn’t say what I expected,” he said, “it would sometimes reflect my feelings in the main character’s lines.”
The author is not the first artist to spark controversy over the use of artificial intelligence, at a time when many creatives feel their existence is threatened by technology.
Last year, Berlin photographer Boris Eldagsen withdrew from the Sony World Photography Awards after revealing that his winning entry in the Creative Photography category was created using the technology.
Meanwhile, authors including George RR Martin, Jodi Picoult and John Grisham last year joined a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, alleging it used copyrighted works while training its systems to produce more human responses .
And more than 10,000 authors, including James Patterson, Roxane Gay and Margaret Atwood, signed an open letter calling on AI industry leaders to seek author consent when using their works to train large language models, and that they would be paid fairly.
Keiichiro Hirano, an author and award committee member, reached out to X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, to explain that the selection committee did not see Kudan's use of AI as a problem.
“It seems that the story that Rie Kudan's award-winning work was written using generative AI has been misinterpreted… If you read it, you will see that generative AI was mentioned in the work,” he wrote. “There will be problems with this type of use in the future, but that is not the case with the Tokyo Sympathy Tower.”
But while some on social media expressed interest in Kudan's creative use of AI and said they were now more interested in his work, others called it “disrespectful” to other authors who wrote without the help of AI.