Author Rie Qudan: Why I used ChatGPT to write my prize-winning novel | Books

“I Do not feel particularly unhappy that my work is used to train AI, ”says Japanese writer Rie Qudan.

The 34-year-old author talks to me about Zoom from her house near Tokyo before the English-language translation of her fourth novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo is released. The book attracted controversy in Japan when it won a prestigious price, even though it was partly written by Chatgpt.

In the heart of sympathy -Tower Tokyo, Sara Machina is a Japanese architect who was commissioned to build a new tower for convicted criminals. It will be a representation of what a figure – not without irony – refers to the “extraordinary broad power of the Japanese”, since the tower will accommodate perpetrators in compassionate comfort.

In the novel, Sara, himself a victim of violent crimes, wonders whether this likeable approach is appropriate to criminals. Does this sympathy reflect Japanese society in reality?

“It is definitely widespread,” says Qudan. One of the triggers for writing the novel was that Murder of the former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe In July 2022. “The person who shot him became a lot of attention in Japan – and her background triggered a lot of sympathy from people. He grew up in a strongly religious household and was robbed of freedom. This idea had been in my head for a long time, and when I wrote the novel, she again came out as part of the process.”

The question of public attitudes towards criminals runs through history in a serious and satirical way. Potential residents of the tower have to carry out a “sympathy test” to determine whether they earn compassion (“Do your parents ever have violent people to do?

The Sympathy Tower Tokyo won the Akutagawa Prize for new or aspiring authors in 2024 when it was published for the first time. She was “pleased,” she says, but also “freed, because as soon as she made her debut as a writer, there is a constant pressure to win this prize”. In 2022 she was nominated for her book student, but did not win. “I had the feeling that I would let people down by not winning the price, and that was something that I didn't want to repeat. You know, with this price he stays with you all your life.”

But the book also attracted attention because Qudan said that part of it – 5% was the number, although she now said that this was only an approximation – was written with artificial intelligence. This, she tells me, comprised parts of the novel that are presented with chatt as an exchange of a character. But Qudan also “gained a lot of inspiration for the novel through” exchange with AI and from the knowledge “that he can reflect human thinking processes in an interesting way. In other words, the use of AI by Qudan tries not to deceive the reader, but to help us to recognize its effects.

A character has pity for the chat bot, “convicted of an empty life in which it endlessly breaks out the language he had to spit out without understanding what this interpretation of other people means”.

Does Qudan fear that AI will replace human writers? “Perhaps a future will come when that happens, but at the moment there is no way that a AI can write a novel that is better than a human author.” Among the Japanese readers, the Sympathy Tower Tokyo “attracted attention to the use of AI.

And this feeds the key problem in the heart of Qudan's book. With Sympathy Tower Tokyo, everything is really about language in which we are not only as we express ourselves in the book, but how we reveal ourselves. “Words determine our reality,” says one character.

The novel is an important debate about the growth of Katakana in Japan-DH the script with which foreign words were written. Words in Katakana (in contrast to Hiragana and Kanji characters that are used to write traditional Japanese words) are similar to transliterations of English -“negurekuto” to neglect it, “fōrin wākāzu” for foreign workers -and for Japanese ears, the “mild, eukomenistic Kanji words” and can avoid traditional Kanji words. The figure Sara believes “Japanese try to give up her own language”. Her friend wants to “stop this miserable spread of Katakana”.

But it is not easy and probably not possible. Qudan explains that older generations of Katakana sometimes via Kanji or vice versa for younger generations as they choose – Qudan was born in 1990 – Katakana has become a standard that is not questioned.

This is not just an academic or cultural detail, but an urgent topic for today's politics of Japan. In Japanese elections last month the right -wing extremist party Sanseeito rose to support14 seats in the upper house of the parliament, where it had previously only held one. The party campaign for a slogan that is translated as a “Japanese people first” and repeats Donald Trump and Magas “America First”. His success sparked the fears of a counter -reaction against Foreigner. Is the variety in Japan valued?

“Unfortunately,” says Qudan, “is the reality that not all Japanese welcome the diversity. Twelve years ago I had a foreign, not Japanese friend, and I introduced him to my parents. My mother was extremely unhappy. She was in panic. It could be the biggest shock in my whole life in this way.

“There are people around them who would never believe them to keep these views that actually have these views. Many Japanese know about the surface, they know how they act as they seem to make them seem [welcoming of diversity]. And this discrepancy between what people think inside and what they say is a very characteristic feature. “

This brings us back to the language and how it can both hide and reveal. In his slogan “Japanese First”, explains Qudan, the Sanseeito party uses the Katakana word for “First” and not the traditional Japanese Kanji word. “By using the Katakana equivalent,” says Qudan, “many of the negative associations can be replaced by neutral. It does not trigger people in the same way.”

In other words, a kind of plausible denial? “Yes, yes. You know exactly what you are doing. And that's why this use of Katakana requires our attention,” concludes Qudan. “If someone uses Katakana, we should ask ourselves: What do you try to hide?”