24-05-2025
AI fiction is already here. Are humans ready?
In January 2024, Rie Qudan won Japan's most prestigious prize for early and mid-career writers, widely seen as the country's literary kingmaker. At the press conference, where she accepted the Akutagawa Prize for her novel 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo,' Qudan made an unthinkable admission to the press and literati: She had used AI to write it.
Throughout 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo,' the narrator converses with a chatbot and the author said she took the bot's half of the dialogue directly from chatGPT, accounting for about 5% of the novel's total text.
'This novel really started with chatGPT,' Qudan later told national broadcaster NHK, saying she made 'full use' of the LLM (large language model) bot to conceive the story.
The Japanese-language press seized on the story, which then spread to international media. Comments poured in online ranging from condemnation that Qudan's AI use was tantamount to plagiarism to jokes that chatGPT should receive 5% of the award money.
A common sentiment read like a prophecy: 'I'm sure we'll see more writers using generative AI text in the future.'
In Rie Qudan's AI-written story 'Kage no ame' ('Rain Shadow'), an abstract disembodied entity reflects on the end of the human race. |
JIJI
A year later, Qudan was back in the news.
Piqued by the backlash over 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo,' editors from advertising magazine Kohkoku approached the 34-year-old author with a commission for their next issue: How would the author feel about, say, a story that was just 5% her — and 95% chatGPT?
'My editor said, 'That's so rude — obviously you can't accept?'' said Qudan at an event on April 6 at Tokyo's Aoyama Book Center to promote the new magazine issue, before adding with a giggle, 'I said, 'Ah, oops, I've already accepted.''
The magazine editors stipulated that Qudan would interpret 5% and 95% as she saw fit and she would publish the prompts she fed to the AI alongside the story. All told, Qudan said at the event, she felt her overall contribution was actually about half.
Creating a decidedly nonhuman work for a nonliterary magazine appealed to her as a provocation and experiment. 'I am always looking for more possibilities,' she said. 'I'm someone who actively wants to do things that would be a little scandalous, things that would be out of the ordinary.'
Human endeavors
The Akutagawa Prize is given for literary fiction, called junbungaku in Japanese, or 'pure literature.' Like in English-language publishing, the lines between literary and genre fiction are blurry, yet attempts to draw or redraw those lines tend to bring out the cultural pearl-clutchers.
In 'Kage no ame' ('Rain Shadow'), published March 25, an abstract disembodied entity reflects on the end of the human race.
'The last human drew their last breath without anyone noticing; the last emotion, too, melted away and disappeared without anyone to observe it.'
The narrator, suggestive of an AI network with some semblance of consciousness (so to speak), contemplates the nature of human emotions using the memories of someone only identified as E.S. Memories, we learn later, which have been downloaded, because E.S., like the rest of humanity, is now gone.
This isn't just another neural net waxing on the essence of human nature (more on this later); E.S. himself searched throughout his life for something like a 'pure' emotion that would, if isolated, allow people to get closer to reality.
But the story, like its writing, maintains a hazy ambivalence. 'Emotions are simply tools,' E.S.'s mother tells him on her death bed, managing to sound both like a robot and a therapist.
Write what you know
What could be written off as a PR stunt for a magazine literally called Ads, takes on new import in the context of a relatively minor but nonetheless disconcerting event from a few weeks prior.
On March 12, Sam Altman tweeted around 1,100 words (with the username @sama, which to a Japanese speaker sounds not unlike someone referring to himself as god). Like Qudan's 4,000-character story, his post is a work of fiction. It, too, involves a disembodied pseudo-consciousness contemplating the mechanics of human expression, in this case, grief. But unlike Qudan, Altman is not a writer; he's the CEO of OpenAI. And unlike Qudan's story, his was written completely by chatGPT.
Altman reportedly fed chatGPT the prompt, 'Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief,' and it responded with a story about Mila ('because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes — poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box') who for unknown reasons is grieving a character called Kai.
In the same tweet, Altman asserts that his yet-to-be-released model is 'good at creative writing' and 'got the vibe of metafiction so right.' By seeming to come directly for writers, he must have known he'd get acerbic trolling right back. Critics compared the story to the work of an undergrad 'who has read a lot of Reddit posts and maybe one David Foster Wallace collection,' written with 'corny sentimentality and showiness (that) tends to fall back on clunky, graspingly incoherent imagery.'
Both Rie Qudan and Sam Altman's AI-written stories had an AI narrator — a safe choice as an AI-written human narrator might quickly ring false with readers. |
GETTY IMAGES
'This is the part where, if I were a proper storyteller, I would set a scene,' says Altman's AI narrator. 'Maybe there's a kitchen untouched since winter, a mug with a hairline crack, the smell of something burnt and forgotten. I don't have a kitchen, or a sense of smell.'
Both stories have an AI narrator who views humanity at a confused remove. (A safe choice — an AI-written human narrator might quickly ring false with readers.) This shared conceit shows us both what draws people to AI-generated fiction and why it falls apart as a form of art.
We are still in the 'AI — look, it sounds just like us. Can you tell the difference?' phase. But when art is a mere gimmick, the moment the gamut is revealed and the initial awe is past, we scroll quickly onto the next thing in our feeds.
Perhaps the question isn't whether AI lit can make us feel — but can it make us feel seen?
Great literature lingers, and when it's at its best, we feel understood. We feel we're not alone, that reaching across time and circumstances is the grasp of someone who has lived. Readers debate authorial intent ad nauseam, but what matters is that it exists. A neural network has never been anywhere, has never touched the wool of any sheep on any hillside, or been walloped by any betrayal. It can only summarize reports of grief or give a statistical approximation of joy.
The bots know that. That's perhaps why Qudan's and Altman's stories both come to the same place — an artificial intelligence who just doesn't get us.
Or maybe these two AI-generated works have something else to reveal: That for all our psychological and neurocognitive plumbing, we humans are still groping in the darkness to figure ourselves out.
Kohkoku Case #01 is available at bookstores in Japan, visit for details. Rie Qudan's 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo' will be available from September 2025, visit for details.
