In January 2024, Rie Qudan won Japan’s most prestigious prize for early and mid-career writers, widely seen as the country’s literary kingmaker. At the press conference, where she accepted the Akutagawa Prize for her novel “Sympathy Tower Tokyo,” Qudan made an unthinkable admission to the press and literati: She had used AI to write it.

Throughout “Sympathy Tower Tokyo,” the narrator converses with a chatbot and the author said she took the bot’s half of the dialogue directly from chatGPT, accounting for about 5% of the novel’s total text.

“This novel really started with chatGPT,” Qudan later told national broadcaster NHK, saying she made “full use” of the LLM (large language model) bot to conceive the story.