A Chinese professor used AI to write a science fiction novel. Then it was a winner in a national competition

Journalism professor Shen Yang plans to detail his creation process so anyone can ‘create good fiction with AI’
But artificial intelligence poses threats to writers and irreversible damage to literary language, a publisher says

Science

Holly Chik

Published: 5:00pm, 20 Dec 2023

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When a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University set out to write a science fiction novel about the metaverse and humanoid robots, he turned to artificial intelligence for inspiration.

The AI ended up generating his entire book – which then took out a national science fiction award honour.

The nearly 6,000-character Chinese-language novel Land of Memories, by Shen Yang, a professor at the university’s school of journalism and communication, was among the winners of the Jiangsu Youth Popular Science Science Fiction Competition, Jinan Times, a newspaper in Shandong province reported.

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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.

Professor Shen Yang from Tsinghua University’s school of journalism and communication. Photo: Weibo/Capital Television

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”.

“After we went through dozens of prompts, the AI generated all of the content – from the pen name, title and text to accompanying pictures.

“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.”

She said AI could pose a threat to writers of suspense novels and science fiction, and warned about what she believed was likely the irreversible damage to literary language caused by AI writing.

“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.”