One of the goals of Shen Yang, a professor at the Journalism faculty at Tsinghua University in Beijing, was to write a science fiction novel centered on the metaverse and humanoid robots. To get inspired, he used the capabilities of artificial intelligence. However, he did much more than that: he ended up generating the novel by himself and, to top it off, received a national award.
Land of Memories, the title of the novel, led Shen Yang to win second place in the Jiangsu Popular Science Fiction Youth Contest. As explained in the South China Morning Post, Yang developed it by introducing 66 prompts into a generative linguistic model, a task that took him 3 hours.
The novel features Li Xiao as the protagonist, a metaverse explorer who worked as a neural engineer in the real world. After accidentally losing the memories of his family, he hopes to gather the scattered fragments of his memory throughout the metaverse.
According to Shen, the AI “generated all the content”, including the images that accompany the text. One of Shen’s requests to the AI was for the literary style to imitate that of Franz Kafka, a renowned author associated with existentialism. And above all, we are facing a historic milestone: “this is the first time that writing done by AI has managed to win a literary prize“. Shen wants to use this fact to make the process of creating the novel public and inspire “anyone who wants to learn how to create good fiction with AI”.
When issuing the verdict, only one of the jury members knew in advance that Shen had used artificial intelligence in his work. However, another judge was able to recognize the influence of AI in the writing. The latter explained that his vote was negative and argued that the novel “lacked emotion“.
