Akutagawa Prize draws controversy after win for work that used ChatGPT

In recent years, the Akutagawa Prize has diversified its recipient pool: In 2022, the shortlist was all female writers, last year Saou Ichikawa was the first author with a severe physical disability to win and this week marked the first time artificial intelligence walked away with a piece of the prestigious literary award.

On Wednesday evening, Rie Qudan won the country’s most important prize for early career writers for “Tokyo-to Dojo-to,” or “Sympathy Tower Tokyo.” The novel is about an architect in the capital, billed as a narrative that “exposes the prophecy of the AI generation.”

In her acceptance speech, Qudan stated: “This is a novel written by making full use of a generative AI like ChatGPT, and probably about 5% of the whole text is written directly from the generative AI. I would like to work well with them to express my creativity.’”