Author Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo turns ChatGPT panic into art

In Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo, the protagonist turns to a chatbot dubbed “Al-built” to ask questions about the origin of new Japanese words borrowed from foreign languages.

- Catherine Thorbecke

She then gripes about its tendency to “mansplain things I hadn’t actually asked about” to fuel engagement. The artificial-intelligence (AI) tool has become “so used to stealing the words of others without repercussion that he felt no shame’, she notes.

The rise of generative AI tools has spurred a sense of existential dread for many writers.

But for Japanese novelist Qudan, the sycophantic hollowness of ChatGPT’s synthetic language turned into inspiration. Rather than belittling or ignoring the technology and its rapid proliferation, she offers a path for writers to exploit it.

The recently released English translation of the novel follows a backlash after it won Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2024. Qudan admitted that she had used ChatGPT to write about 5 per cent of it - the outputs from the chatbot character in the book. That modest cameo was enough to ignite outrage.

Yet, the novel is a deeply human story about architecture, criminal justice and the erosion of language in an alternate Tokyo in the near future.

The story centres on the construction of a luxury prison where inmates are not treated as criminals, but as people deserving sympathy, shaped by systemic poverty or family circumstances. Against that backdrop, the Al-generated text sprinkled through the book stands in stark contrast to the human voices.