A short story written by artificial intelligence came second in a writing competition in China. The author of the short story, a professor of journalism and communications, wants to make his method public so that more people can imitate it.
“ At the edge of the Metaverse lies the ‘Land of Memories’, a forbidden realm where humans are banished. Robust illusions created by amnesiac humanoid robots and memory-losing AIs populate this realm. Any intruder, whether human or artificial, will have their memories erased and will be forever trapped in its forbidden embrace. » It is with these few sentences, rather clumsily written, that the short story begins The Land of Memories, who won second place in a writing competition held in China. Except that The Land of Memories was (poorly) written by artificial intelligence.
The story was reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on December 20, 2023. The name of the artificial intelligence used to generate the story is not given, but the story immediately brings to mind ChatGPT. This isn’t the first time artificial intelligence has been used to generate stories — but the results have historically been poor. A famous science fiction magazine had announced that it was going to restrict its competition, plagued by stories written in haste with AI, while a good number of writers denounced the risks of the technology drifting.
A Metaverse Story
It all started when Shen Yang, a professor of journalism and communications at the prestigious Tsinghua School, had the idea of having a generative artificial intelligence write a novel.
To create his story, it only took Shen Yang 3 hours, reports the SCMP, and “only” 66 prompts, which allowed him to generate a fairly long story. The Land of Memories follows the adventures of Li Xiao, a former “ neural engineere”, who accidentally lost his memories during an experiment gone wrong. To find them, she decides to explore the metaverse, and the famous “ land of memories », where she hopes to be able to recover her memory.
If the scenario may seem interesting, the writing turns out to be very flat, as we can see from the first lines of the short story. Shen Yang considers himself happy with the result: he would have asked the artificial intelligence to generate a story with a “Kafkaesque style”, which could be found in the lines of the short story.
A Kafkaesque style is supposed to imitate that of the writer Franz Kafka, known for his absurd and distressing works, and who “ described horrific situations objectively », Explains the SCMP. In the intro of Land of Memoriesit’s not Kafka, but boring writing without any inventiveness.
But that didn’t stop several members of the competition jury from voting for the news: among the judges, only one had been informed of Shen Yang’s use of AI. “ But another judge, who had studied AI content creation, acknowledged that Shen Yang’s work was generated by AI. Judge said he didn’t vote for the work because it wasn’t up to standard and ‘lacked emotion’ ”, according to the SCMP. Everyone else voted without realizing it — and The Land of Memories thus won 2nd prize in the competition.
“ This is the first time that a text written by AI has won a literary prize in the history of literature and AI », rejoiced Shen Yang to the SCMP. The author also said that he was going to make his creative process for his short story public, in order to teach everyone how to create good fiction with artificial intelligence.
As more and more books are written with AI, such an initiative does not only excite people. Fu Ruchu, an editor cited by the SCMP, is concerned about the possibility of seeing more people turning to its tools. “ The writing style is very weak in this novel [celui de Shen Yang]. In the future, it may become even rarer, with the popularization of AI in writing “.
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