“At the borders of the Metaverse lies the Land of Memories, a forbidden realm from which humans are excluded. » So begins The land of memories, an award-winning short story in the fifth edition of the Jiangsu science fiction literary competition. This text was generated by Shen Yang, professor emeritus of the School of Journalism at Tsinghua University in Beijing, with artificial intelligence (AI). “This is the first time that an AI has won a literary prize in the history of literature, in the history of artificial intelligence,” Mr. Shen said.
Shen Yang, already known for his experimental work with AI, has documented his “assisted creation” process, as reported at the end of December by South China Morning Postso “that anyone who wants to learn how to write good fiction with AI can do so”.
Mr. Shen worked with the AI for three hours, giving it 66 commands, to produce a draft of 43,000 characters. The professor then cut, sculpted and refined this first draft, to arrive at a manuscript of some 6,000 Chinese characters, The land of memories (Land of Memoriesalso translated by some media like Land of Machine Memory).
Among his demands was that of producing a Kafkaesque style. For the flesh-and-blood professor of literature at Sciences Po Frédérique Leichter-Flack, this style is “a way of experiencing the relationship with power, the confrontation of the individual with power experienced as a bureaucratic labyrinth or even an impression of nightmare, of disturbing strangeness into which our familiar way of life can fall.”
The AI played it like this: in the land of memories, “tangible illusions, forged by amnesiac humanoid robots and AIs that have lost their memories, populate this domain. Any intruder, human or artificial, will have their memories dried up and will be forever trapped in its forbidden embrace.”
In this land we follow Li Xiao, a traveler from the metaverse who seeks to recover her lost memories, those of her real life, in which she was a neural engineer, and where an accident erased her family memory.
It was also the AI that produced the illustrations accompanying the text, and even the pseudonym that masked Professor Shen, which was @SiliconZen.
Anticipatory literature
Is this a breach, worrying in anticipation, for the authors? The cracks that allowed Mr. Shen to win the prize were very wide. Already, one of the members of the jury, Fu Changyi, president of the organizing committee of the competition, was aware of the process. It was he who encouraged the human author to submit the text, according to Cybernews, in order to test the jury’s reactions. Current rules do not prohibit the use of AI for writing.
Furthermore, the literary competition rewards amply, to the point of diluting the impact of the laurels it grants. The 200 texts submitted shared 55 awards, including six Grand Prix, 14 first prizes, 18 second prizes and 27 third places (sic). Three out of six judges voted for The land of memoriesthus placing it in the group of second prizes.
Xiao Xinghan was one of those on the jury who did not accept the text. The science fiction author, whose latest work, you can’t make this up, is The Song of Human and AI (The song of humans and AI), said he recognized the mechanical signature.
Xiao asks himself, always according to Cybernewswhether AI literature “will be but a soon-to-be-forgotten ripple on the river of history” or whether it will become so widespread that it will become “an obstacle to the survival of authors.”
Furthermore, the members of the jury agreed that The land of memories was not ready to become a book, at least not without significant revisions. “Text written by AI is still very different from texts written by humans,” Fu said.
My favorite author is a machine
Are machines better able to produce texts on machines? In the United States, in February 2023, the digital magazine Clarkesworldfounded in 2006 and specialized in science fiction and fantasyclosed all its calls for text submissions, because the editorial staff was overwhelmed with works made by AI.
Clarkesworldwhich pays $0.12 per word for published texts, has since banned the use of AI or ChatGPT, even as an editorial tool, under penalty of authors no longer having the right to submit future writings.
Let us recall, in another field, that last April, the German photographer Boris Eldagsen had submitted an image, The Electricianproduced by AI, at the prestigious Sony World Photography Awards for photography.
The artist, whose work focuses on false memories, had refused the prize in the free creation category thus won, saying that his desire was above all to provoke debate on the arrival of AI in art.
In Quebec, last fall, the Union of Quebec Writers, the Regroupement des artistes en arts nationaux du Québec and Illustration Québec jointly signed an open letter on AI, inviting their members to share their experiences and testimonies of their use in artistic practice.
The National Association of Book Publishers, for its part, devoted the first part of its annual general meeting to asking, through conferences, “How publishing houses can adapt to the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) and evolve with it.”