“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…
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