Photo/Illutration A screen of ChatGPT (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

A university student was hired as a part-time proofreader of a novel written by AI, not a human. Through his exchanges with the “author,” the student began to sense the author’s “consciousness.” He decided to visit the author at its workshop to confirm, and he saw ... .

The above is from a novel by Kamome Ashizawa titled “Anata wa Soko ni Imasuka?” (Are you there?), which won last year’s top literary award named after Shinichi Hoshi (1926-1997), a science-fiction writer known for his “short short” stories.

Ashizawa himself partially uses AI for creative writing. I was surprised to learn that the award-winning work was one of as many as 101 versions produced by AI during the last three weeks before the submission deadline.

Will this method of novel-writing become popular? A chatbot named ChatGPT is attracting attention.

When you ask it a question on a computer, the perfectly fluent bot replies in long sentences. It is designed to pick out relevant words from a huge amount of data, and its use is being considered for writing screenplays.

In this day and age, AI reproduces the voice of iconic Japanese pop singer Hibari Misora (1937-1989), and paintings of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939).

By extension, AI should have no trouble authoring novels and columns as well. But as someone who struggles mightily every day to write this column, I cannot help feeling a bit alarmed.

And my sentiment is echoed by the student in Ashizawa’s story.

He says that what is important in a creative activity is the will to give birth to something. Therefore, sets of words strung together by AI according to the theory of probability “are not what a novel expresses” and “reveal a lack of commitment to creativity because all you want is an easy way out and you don’t care what you produce.”

I was about to applaud the writer, when I came across his online account of how he wrote the novel, and my eyes bugged out.

Those very words, Ashizawa said, were written with AI’s assistance.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Feb. 23

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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