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The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Author Rie Qudan: Why I used ChatGPT to write my prize-winning novel
'I don't feel particularly unhappy about my work being used to train AI,' says Japanese novelist Rie Qudan. 'Even if it is copied, I feel confident there's a part of me that will remain, which nobody can copy.' The 34-year old author is talking to me via Zoom from her home near Tokyo, ahead of the publication of the English-language translation of her fourth novel, Sympathy Tower Tokyo. The book attracted controversy in Japan when it won a prestigious prize, despite being partly written by ChatGPT. At the heart of Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a Japanese architect, Sara Machina, who has been commissioned to build a new tower to house convicted criminals. It will be a representation of what one character – not without irony – calls 'the extraordinary broadmindedness of the Japanese people', in that the tower will house offenders in compassionate comfort. In the novel, Sara, herself a victim of violent crime, wonders if this sympathetic approach to criminals is appropriate. Does this sympathy reflect Japanese society in reality? 'It's definitely prevalent,' says Qudan. One of the triggers for writing the novel, she adds, was the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022. 'The person who shot him became the centre of a lot of attention in Japan – and his background elicited a lot of sympathy from people. He had grown up in a heavily religious household, and been deprived of freedom. That idea had been in my head for a long time, and when I came to write the novel, it came out again as part of the process.' The question of public attitudes towards criminals runs through the story, in serious and satirical ways. Potential residents of the tower must take a 'Sympathy Test' to determine if they are deserving of compassion ('Have your parents ever acted violently towards you? – Yes / No / Don't know') … and the ultimate decision will be made by AI. Sympathy Tower Tokyo won the Akutagawa prize in 2024 for new or rising authors when it was first published. She was 'delighted', she says, but also 'liberated, because once you make your debut as a writer, there's a constant pressure to win this prize'. In 2022, she had been nominated for her book Schoolgirl, but didn't win. 'I felt I'd let people down by not winning the prize, and that was something I didn't want to repeat. You know, with that prize it stays with you your whole life.' But the book also grabbed attention because Qudan said that part of it – 5% was the figure given, though she now says that was only an approximation – was written using artificial intelligence. This, she tells me, comprised parts of the novel which are presented as a character's exchange with ChatGPT. But Qudan also 'gained a lot of inspiration' for the novel through 'exchanges with AI and from the realisation that it can reflect human thought processes in interesting ways'. Qudan's use of AI, in other words, seeks not to deceive the reader but to help us to see its effects. One character feels pity for the chatbot, '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 fear that AI will supplant human writers? 'Maybe a future will come when that happens, but right now there's no way an AI can write a novel that's better than a human author.' Among Japanese readers, Sympathy Tower Tokyo 'did get attention for using AI. But more than that, it was a focus on the language itself which really generated discussion; how the changes of language over the last few decades are affecting how people act or view things.' And this feeds into the key issue at the heart of Qudan's book. Sympathy Tower Tokyo is really all about language, which in the book is not just how we express ourselves, but how we reveal ourselves. 'Words determine our reality,' says one character. In the novel, a key debate is around the growth of katakana in Japan – that is, the script used to write foreign-derived words. Words rendered in katakana (as opposed to hiragana script and kanji characters, which are used to write traditional Japanese words) resemble transliterations of English – 'negurekuto' for neglect, 'fōrin wākāzu' for foreign workers – and to Japanese ears they are 'milder, more euphemistic' than traditional kanji words, and can avoid 'discriminatory turns of phrase'. The character Sara thinks 'Japanese people are trying to abandon their own language'. Her boyfriend wants to 'stop this wretched proliferation of katakana'. But stopping it is not easy, and probably not possible. Qudan explains that while older generations sometimes choose katakana over kanji, or vice versa, for younger generations like her – Qudan was born in 1990 – katakana 'has become a standard which is not questioned'. This is not merely an academic or cultural detail, but an urgent issue for Japan's politics today. In Japanese elections last month, the far-right party Sanseito surged in support, winning 14 seats in the upper house of parliament, where it had previously held only one. The party campaigns on a slogan that translates as 'Japanese people first', echoing Donald Trump and Maga's 'America first'. Its success has raised fears of an anti-foreigner backlash. Is diversity valued in Japan? 'Unfortunately,' Qudan says, 'the reality is that not all Japanese people welcome diversity. Twelve years ago, I had a foreign, non-Japanese boyfriend, and I introduced him to my parents. My mother was extremely unhappy. She panicked. It might have been the biggest shock in my entire life to see my own mother react in this way. I'd never thought of her as someone who discriminated against foreigners. 'There are people all around you who you would never think hold those views, who actually do hold those views. A lot of Japanese people, on the surface, they know how to act in a way that makes them seem [welcoming of diversity]. And this discrepancy between what people think on the inside and what they say is a very distinctive feature.' This brings us back to language, and how it can both conceal and reveal. In its 'Japanese people first' slogan, Qudan explains, the Sanseito party uses the katakana word for 'first', rather than the traditional Japanese kanji word. 'By using the katakana equivalent,' Qudan says, 'a lot of the negative associations can be replaced by neutral ones. It doesn't trigger people in the same way.' It creates, in other words, a sort of plausible deniability? 'Yes, yes. They know exactly what they're doing. And that's why this use of katakana requires our attention,' Qudan concludes. 'When someone uses katakana, we should ask: what are they trying to hide?' Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan is published on 21 August (Penguin Books, £10.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Culture clash: Sympathy Tokyo Tower, by Rie Qudan, reviewed
Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them, kanji and katakana, is a key theme of last year's prizewinning speculative fiction Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan – a lyrical, witty, satirical but meditative and meticulous text, now published in Jesse Kirkwood's vibrant and faithful English translation. We are in the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo in the lightly altered mid-2020s. The Olympics took place in 2021, a year late as a result of the pandemic, but one curious difference has occurred: Zaha Hadid's futuristic national stadium, which in our reality was cancelled at the last minute, was in fact built. This minor change seems to have ushered in other more widespread shifts in politics and culture. Notably, a huge new skyscraper in the middle of the city is to house criminals in comfort and luxury, as part of society's debt to these unfortunate beings. A glimpse into a potential near future (which might be a dystopia or a utopia, depending on your point of view), Sympathy Tower Tokyo has some connections with Yoko Ogawa's excellent dreamlike science fiction The Memory Police (1994), as well as more distant echoes of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Yet this is a wholly distinctive novel, alarmingly prescient and up to date. Controversy arose – and still seems to infest chatter about the book – when Qudan divulged that she used AI to write part of it. She later clarified that AI was employed only to generate specific responses in the text when a character consults a chatbot – a creative touch which, rather than representing laxity or deception, surely carries a Joycean level of authenticity. Sara Machina, a celebrated architect, is to design the building, which is to be officially called 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo' – a name which irks Sara, since it uses katakana characters to approximate the English words, a common trend in modern Japanese, rather than the more difficult, but established, kanji script. Kanji are the thousands of intricately complex Chinese-origin characters children (and foreigners) struggle to learn. The more straightforward, phonetic katakana is for loanwords, buzzwords, commercial jargon and the like. Qudan uses this issue to explore how kanji might transmit tradition and certainty, katakana flexibility and ambiguity – but might kanji not also carry prejudice and the burdens of the past, which could be swept away by the invigorating, outward-looking torrent of contemporary katakana, especially when it comes to shifting socio-sexual topics such as global warming, crime and gender? Yet, if the Japanese are to change their language, will they not also lose the distinctiveness of their national identity? Readers who know Japanese will naturally get more out of this than those unfamiliar with the language, but the ideas discussed will stimulate anyone. This is a book which raises profound and ever-pressing questions about the elusive nature of words, their symbolic status, and their multi-faceted, convoluted relationship with geography, history and culture. It explores the relationship between the urban, built environment and our fabricated world of words, between social and linguistic developments, between the kaleidoscopic vogues of language, society and philosophy. And it examines the way architecture, like words, can be destructive as well as creative, while criminals can be victims, too, worthy of love and reward just as much as hatred and punishment. Told from ever-shifting verbal and textual perspectives, with playful nods to contemporary controversies (AI; the Hadid stadium hullabaloo; cancel culture; Covid; Twitter's name change), this is a spirited novel that asks profound questions, impishly worrying about the potentially flavourless future of humanity. The tower itself can re-assimilate persecuted delinquents, making society more equal, more just, (more boring?) – just as AI threatens to steal everyone's jobs and turn vibrant global languages into one bland gloopy soup: harmless but meaningless, safe but insipid. Sympathy Tower Tokyo feels so über-zeitgeisty that it might have been written this morning, and it is alive with all the tools (and fools) of modernity. Yet it is far more than merely topical or trendy, as deep moral, political, social, cultural, architectural and lingual problems collide, merge and inform each other throughout this relatively short novel. A contemporary gem.
Japan Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
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.
