The AI ended up generating his entire book – which then took out a national science fiction award honour.
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Shen crafted the sci-fi narrative from a draft of 43,000 characters generated in just three hours with 66 prompts. The unique storyline set the scene with the first three lines, all generated by AI:
“In the metaverse’s edge, lies the ‘Land of Memories’, a forbidden realm where humans are barred. Solid illusions crafted by amnesiac humanoid robots and AI that had lost memories populate its domain.
“Any intruder, be it human or artificial, will have their memories drained away, forever trapped within its forbidden embrace.”
The story centres on a metaverse explorer named Li Xiao, who used to be a neural engineer in the real world.
After accidentally losing all memories of her family during an experiment, she becomes interested in the legend of the Land of Memories, and hopes that her lost memories can be retrieved in the metaverse.
The novel was submitted to the competition held by the Jiangsu Science Writers Association. At the October awards ceremony it won a second prize, alongside 17 other stories, meaning it won votes from three of the six judges.
Among the judges, only one was notified that Shen had used AI in his work, according to the report. But another judge, who had been exploring AI content creation, recognised that Shen’s work was AI-generated. The judge said he did not vote for the submission because it was not up to standard and “lacked emotion”.
“It was asked to write in the Kafkaesque literary style,” Shen was quoted as saying, referring to the distinctive writing style of Bohemian novelist Franz Kafka, which involves portraying terrifying situations in an objective tone.
“This is the first time AI writing has won a literary award in the history of literature and of AI,” he said, adding that the creation process of the novel would be detailed and made public “for anyone who would like to learn how to create good fiction with AI”.
According to the report, Fu Ruchu, editorial department director at the People’s Literature Publishing House, said it was not easy to recognise that Shen’s piece was generated by AI.
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“Science fiction writers often pay more attention to creativity and scene description than language,” Fu was quoted as saying.
“I think this novel is well done and logically consistent.”
“The sense of language in this novel is very weak. I think this sense of language may become even rarer in the future,” she said.
“With more AI writing, it will be more scarce and elusive.”
