AI-generated novel wins national award

A real sensation was when a Chinese professor received a literary prize for a text that was written… by artificial intelligence. A Chinese-language work entitled “Land of Machine Memories” won second prize at the 5th Jiangsu Non-Fiction Literature Competition. Only one of the jury members knew that the application, submitted by a professor at the prestigious Tsinghua University, was entirely generated by artificial intelligence.

It took Shen Yang, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University, just three hours to create this text. According to Chinese media reports, the draft of more than 40,000 characters was generated based on 66 clues given by the professor. The text was then edited by Shen herself. She is also the head of the Science Fiction Committee of the Jiangsu Provincial Nonfiction Writers Association, which organized the literary competition. The competition rules do not directly prohibit the use of artificial intelligence, so the author who used the services of AI did not violate anything.

The main character of “Land of Machine Memory” is an adventurer in the metaverse named Li Xiao. She is a neurotechnician seeking to recover lost memories from her real life.

Shen submitted the work under a pseudonym and was the only participant to do so. Three of the six jury members voted for the manuscript, which ensured its victory.

About 200 works were submitted to the competition, six of which received the Grand Prix, 14 first prizes, 18 second prizes and 27 third prizes.

The idea to submit an excerpt of almost 6 thousand characters to the competition, as reported by Wuhan Evening News, was given to the writer by one of the award jury members named Fu Chanyi. In an interview with the newspaper, he said that he did not reveal to the other jury members the true authorship of the text because he wanted to see their unbiased decision.

According to Shen, her entire competition entry was generated by artificial intelligence, including novel outlines, illustrations and even her pseudonym, which translates into English as SiliconZen.

Science-fiction writer and one of the judges who voted against Machine Memories Land Xiao Xinghan revealed to Wuhan Evening News that he realized that the text was generated by artificial intelligence because it lacked emotion, but “mainly because I didn’t think he was good enough.” Xiao noted that literature created by artificial intelligence could be “a ripple that will soon be forgotten in the river of history” or become so widespread that it becomes “a serious problem for the survival of real writers.”

Despite winning the award, the judges agreed that The Land of Machine Memories could not be published in its original form and would require significant changes.

“Texts written by artificial intelligence are still very different from texts written by humans,” comments Shen Yangu.

Recall that in April 2023, a photographer from Berlin won the Sony World Photography Awards with an image created using artificial intelligence, but refused the prize. He said that this type of AI-generated images and traditional photography should not be entered into the same competitions.

Shen Yang plans to detail the writing process so that everyone can “create good fiction using artificial intelligence.”

However, experts are unanimous in their opinion that artificial intelligence poses a threat to writers and causes irreversible damage to the literary language. However, AI translation is helping Chinese novels find more and more readers overseas.