Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize.
The novel is actually called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or “Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi” in Japanese. The meta-narrative wasn’t enough to win first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony, but it did come close.
Hitoshi Matsubara and his team at Future University Hakodate in Japan selected words and sentences, and set parameters for construction before letting the AI “write” the novel autonomously.
The prize itself is somewhat unique. It was established in 2013 to honor Hoshi Shinichi, one of Japan’s most beloved and prolific authors of science fiction. In 2014, Hoshi’s daughter Marina Hoshi Whytemade made the decision to accept literature written by robots and computers.
Here’s a except from the novel to give you an idea as to what human contestants were up against:
“I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement.
“The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans.”
