How AI Helped An Author Win A Major Literary Prize
Japanese novelist Rie Qudan isn’t worried about artificial intelligence taking her job. “I don’t feel particularly unhappy about my work being used to train AI,” she states. “Even if it is copied, I feel confident there’s a part of me that will remain, which nobody can copy.”
Qudan, 34, recently gained international attention after her fourth novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo, won a prestigious literary award in Japan, sparking a debate because a portion of it was written with the help of ChatGPT.
An Award Winning Novel and AI Controversy
The novel centers on Sara Machina, a Japanese architect tasked with designing a compassionate high-rise prison for criminals. This premise allows Qudan to explore a complex question: is a sympathetic approach to offenders truly reflective of Japanese society? This question was partly inspired by the public's reaction to the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2022, where the attacker’s difficult background garnered surprising levels of public sympathy.
Winning the Akutagawa prize for new authors in 2024 was both a delight and a relief for Qudan, freeing her from the pressure to secure the career-defining award. However, the victory was quickly followed by controversy when she revealed that approximately 5% of the novel was generated by AI.
The Human Element Behind The AI
Qudan is transparent about her use of technology. The AI-generated text appears in sections where a character is directly interacting with ChatGPT. More importantly, she used her conversations with the AI as a source of inspiration, finding that it could reflect human thought processes in fascinating ways. Her goal was not to deceive the reader but to use AI as a tool to explore its own effects on language and humanity.
One character in the novel even pities the chatbot, describing it as being “condemned to an empty life of endlessly spewing out the language it was told to spew, without ever understanding what this cut-and-paste patchwork of other people’s words meant.”
Does Qudan believe AI will eventually replace human authors? “Maybe a future will come when that happens,” she says, “but right now there’s no way an AI can write a novel that’s better than a human author.”
Language as the True Protagonist
While the use of AI drew headlines, Qudan notes that the novel’s core discussion in Japan was about language itself. Sympathy Tower Tokyo argues that the words we use fundamentally shape our perception of reality. The book delves into the growing use of katakana, the Japanese script for foreign-derived words, over traditional kanji characters.
Words written in katakana, which often resemble transliterations of English terms, can sound “milder, more euphemistic” to a Japanese ear. In the novel, the protagonist worries that “Japanese people are trying to abandon their own language,” while her boyfriend wants to “stop this wretched proliferation of katakana.” For younger generations like Qudan’s, however, the use of katakana has become an unquestioned standard.
The Political Power of a Single Word
This linguistic shift has significant real-world political implications. Qudan points to the recent electoral surge of the far-right Sanseito party, which campaigns on a slogan that translates to “Japanese people first.” The party’s success has stoked fears of rising anti-foreigner sentiment.
Qudan explains that the party strategically uses the katakana word for “first” instead of the traditional kanji equivalent. “By using the katakana equivalent, a lot of the negative associations can be replaced by neutral ones. It doesn’t trigger people in the same way.”
She shares a personal story to illustrate the hidden prejudices in society, recalling her mother’s shocked and unhappy reaction when introduced to her foreign boyfriend years ago. “This discrepancy between what people think on the inside and what they say is a very distinctive feature,” she notes.
This intentional use of language creates a form of plausible deniability. “They know exactly what they’re doing,” Qudan concludes. “And that’s why this use of katakana requires our attention. When someone uses katakana, we should ask: what are they trying to hide?”
