Rie Kudan

Rie Kudan (born 1990) is a Japanese novelist who won the 170th Akutagawa Prize in January 2024 for “Tokyo-to Dojo-to” (“Sympathy Tower Tokyo”), a near-future novel about an architect commissioned to build a humane high-rise prison in a Tokyo where generative AI saturates daily life. The selection committee praised the book as “practically flawless.”

The 5% confession

At the prize press conference, Kudan volunteered that she had made active use of ChatGPT and that roughly 5% of the book reproduced AI-generated sentences word for word — mostly as the dialogue of an AI character within the story. She also described confiding thoughts to the chatbot that she “can’t talk about with anyone else,” with its replies sometimes inspiring the novel’s dialogue.

The disclosure made global headlines as a scandal, but Japan’s literary establishment largely shrugged: committee member and novelist Keiichiro Hirano noted the AI use was legible in the work itself and said the committee did not see it as a problem. The episode became a landmark counterpoint in the authorship debate — a top-tier literary jury judging a partially machine-worded novel on its merits, in the same season Western authors like George R.R. Martin were suing over AI training.

Kudan has framed the tool as both subject and collaborator: a novel about living with sympathetic machines, partly written with one. Her stated plan to keep profiting from AI while letting her creativity express itself remains one of the most unapologetic pro-AI statements by a prize-winning literary novelist.