A Robot wrote a short novel, and it almost won a literary prize

Guess what? A Japanese AI program has co-authored a short-form novel that passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize.

The novel titled The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or “Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi” in Japanese almost won the first prize at the third Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award ceremony.

Officially, the novel was written by a very human team that led the AI program’s development. Hitoshi Matsubara and his team at Future University Hakodate in Japan selected words and sentences, and set parameters for construction before letting the AI “write” the novel autonomously.

One of the team’s two submissions to the competition made it past the first round of screening, despite a blind reading policy that prevents judges from knowing whether an AI was involved in the writing process. Digital trends reported.

“I was surprised at the work because it was a well-structured novel. But there are still some problems [to overcome] to win the prize, such as character descriptions,” said Satoshi Hase, a Japanese science fiction novelist who was part of the press conference surrounding the award.

For the past few years, the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award has technically been open to non-human applicants. This year was the first time the award committee received submissions that were written by robots.

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