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Author Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo turns ChatGPT panic into art
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Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo centres on the construction of a luxury prison where inmates are treated with sympathy.
PHOTOS: RIE QUDAN/INSTAGRAM, PENGUIN BOOKS
Catherine Thorbecke
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In Rie Qudan’s Sympathy Tower Tokyo, the protagonist turns to a chatbot dubbed “AI-built” to ask questions about the origin of new Japanese words borrowed from foreign languages.
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.
