In 2010, a small controversy broke out around the novel The map and the territory by Michel Houellebecq, who had just won the Goncourt prize. We discovered in this novel entire passages copied from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Plagiarism? Literary collage? Intertextuality ? Still, Houellebecq did not deny it and even thanked Wikipedia in the pocket edition of his book. In any case, he was far from being the only writer to have used this collective encyclopedia to construct a novel, enough for us to speak for a moment of “Wikipedia literature”.
Other times, another controversy. By winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, which is described as the Japanese Goncourt, the writer Rie Kudan caused a stir by admitting to having used ChatGPT to write around 5% of her novel, which takes place in a futuristic Tokyo. After a few outbursts and torn shirts on social networks, we ended up understanding that these extracts were essentially contained in dialogues, when a character communicates with artificial intelligence.
It’s annoying, we haven’t been able to read this book yet which has not been translated into French, but what we note is that the dialogues generated by the AI are an integral part of the story , and… and why not? The novelist also intends to continue this exploration of AI in her work.
In the future, I plan to use text generative AI. I would like to use it cleverly in writing novels while demonstrating my own creativity.
Rie Kudan
Does a writer deserve to receive a literary prize if 5% of his novel was written by artificial intelligence? I asked the question to a ChatGPT software which replied: “The question is complex and open to interpretation. It depends on different factors such as the impact of artificial intelligence on the work, the role of the writer in its creation and the criteria for the literary prize in question. In the current state of AI-assisted writing, it is generally accepted that artificial intelligence cannot be considered an author in its own right. However, the use of AI can play a significant role in shaping the content of a novel. If the writer only supervised or edited the AI’s results, this could be considered a collaboration between the writer and the AI. In this case, it is legitimate to ask whether the writer deserves an award for his work. However, if AI played a leading role in the creation of the novel, it may be more difficult to argue that the writer alone deserves the award. In this case, the recognition could be shared between the writer and the AI, recognizing the role of each in the creation of the work. »
I’m stopping the transcription here before I’m accused of having written more than 5% of this column with ChatGPT, which gives me the impression of preaching for his parish (or a literary prize). The problem here is that if I hadn’t specified that this response came from the AI, we would have seen nothing but fire (and a little less humor than usual). In this sense, I find Rie Kudan rather honest in having explained his approach.
The debate is elsewhere, more precisely on what AI feeds on. In a post on France Culture, writer Bernard Werber recalled that a group of American authors, including John Grisham and Michael Connelly, launched a collective action against the firm Open AI, accusing it of having used their works to creating novels without their consent and of course without receiving a penny for it. More than 10,000 authors have signed the petition. It also tells us that fans of Games of Thrones, tired of waiting for the next book by George R. R. Martin, used ChatGPT to finish the series, which I find disturbing, because what’s the point if it doesn’t come from the author of the saga? Notice, impatience and admiration have given us what we call fanfiction, when budding authors appropriate a universe they love to continue to develop it. Will AI destroy this field, since it writes much faster than us?
Werber himself tested the application, asking him to create a text in the “Werber” style, concluding with astonishing humility that ChatGPT wrote better than him, because the generated sentences were in his opinion more complex and the vocabulary richer !
“In fact, it allowed me to understand my specificity as an author even better,” he said. I favor the complexity of the story over the complexity of the form. What ChatGPT offered me is like a dish in sauce, where we replace the banality or the blandness of the story with the thickness of the sauce. However, I don’t think that ChatGPT can invent an original complex plot, it can only copy those that already exist. And that’s precisely why this phenomenon is interesting: it will force real writers to become even more creative, even more original, and probably to take even more risks to get off the beaten track. »
Werber seems optimistic to me, but I’m not reassured (neither are the screenwriters who went on strike in Hollywood). Will the readership make the difference? I, who thought I was good at spotting AI-generated images, failed miserably in a fascinating test of New York Times which asked you to recognize real photos of human faces among those made by AI. Take the test and be confused. How could I then locate extracts from novels written by a robot?
O, ChatGPT, recite to me the first words of The divine comedy of Dante! The answer : Of course. Right in the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark forest, because the right path was lost… I would have preferred the voice of Fayolle Jean Sr rather than the robotic one of the application, but I imagine that it will come, with the vocal hyperfaking.