Award-Winning AI Literature

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Award-Winning AI Literature

This a list of literary awards granted to works where AI was used (or was suspected) as part of the writing process

24 cases

Confirmed AI use: 3 (12.5%)

AI was allowed from the start: 7 (29.2%)

Organizers said AI was used: 2 (8.3%)

Suspected or disputed: 6 (25.0%)

Nominations and shortlists withdrawn: 3 (12.5%)

Near-misses and eligibility cases: 3 (12.5%)

CONFIRMED AI USE

🇯🇵 Novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Kudan — 170th Akutagawa Prize, 2024

Kudan first guessed that about 5% of the novel involved ChatGPT, then gave a much smaller figure: about one page out of 143. She consulted its output for the replies written by the AI inside the novel. The prize stood.

🇨🇳 Short story The Land of Machine Memories by Shen Yang, writing as “QuartZen” — 5th Youth Popular Science and Science Fiction Competition, Second Prize, 2023

AI generated the title, prose, illustrations, and pen name over 66 rounds of prompting. The organizer invited Shen and hid the experiment from the judges. This is often called a national literary prize, but it was a broad Jiangsu association contest: 18 stories shared second prize and 90 of roughly 200 entries received awards.

🇯🇵 Web novel Modest Skill “Tidying Up” Is the Strongest! — 18th AlphaPolis Fantasy Novel Awards, Grand Prize and Reader’s Choice, 2025

The author said a large majority of the web novel was made with generative AI. AlphaPolis later canceled the print edition and manga adaptation and changed its rules. Reporting confirms those cancellations, but not that the two award labels were formally revoked.

AI WAS ALLOWED FROM THE START

🇯🇵 Short story Are You There? by Kamome Ashizawa — 9th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Excellence Award, 2022

Ashizawa made 101 stories in three weeks with AI. The story that won was mostly written by Ashizawa with a little AI; the other hundred experiments were mostly machine-generated. This was the first AI-assisted story to win a Hoshi prize.

🇯🇵 Short story The Last Painter by Toh Katagiri — 12th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Excellence Award, 2025

The organizers classified it as AI-assisted, but never said exactly how. A fellow finalist says Katagiri told the group that every sentence was written personally.

🇯🇵 Short story Genome Tower by Shamizui — 13th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Grand Prix, 2026

The disclosed AI use was apparently limited to inventing the name of a fictional disease. The organizers still counted it among the year’s AI-assisted winners.

🇯🇵 Short story Parallel Self-Mediation Co., Ltd. by En Shijima — 13th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Excellence Award, 2026

Shijima described working with AI as feeling more like “choosing” than “writing.” This sounds like a much more generative collaboration than Genome Tower. The prize stood.

🇯🇵 Short story Erinnerung by Rino Takinouchi — 13th Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award, Excellence Award, 2026

ChatGPT produced initial material. Takinouchi corrected confused pronouns, dated phrases, and broken logic, then changed the title and ending and added the CRISPR-Cas9 material. Of the 2026 Hoshi winners, this has the clearest public account of AI-generated prose being extensively rewritten.

The 13th Hoshi award received 2,107 entries. Organizers counted 491 as partly AI-created and said three of the four general-division winners had used AI somewhere in the process.

🇺🇸 Poetry series ReRites by David Jhave Johnston — Electronic Literature Organization Robert Coover Award, 2022

Twelve books of poetry built from neural-network output selected and edited by Johnston. The project openly calls itself “Human + A.I. poetry,” which is exactly the kind of thing an electronic-literature award exists to recognize.

🇺🇸 Short story Stargazers by Ruei-Jie Chang — UCSB Mind & Machine Intelligence Writing Contest, First Prize, 2024

Chang used ChatGPT for the seed of the story and Claude to organize and translate a Mandarin-English draft, then revised it. The contest explicitly welcomed human-only, machine-only, and hybrid entries, and required everyone to document the process.

ORGANIZERS SAID AI WAS USED

🇸🇬 Poems Migrant Writers of Singapore poetry competition — Migrant Literature Festival, 2024

Eight winners were announced, then the entire list was recalled after organizers said three winning entries were AI-generated. Their review relied partly on Scribbr and QuillBot.

🇺🇸 Poems Poetry.com November and December contests — Two Monthly First Prizes, 2024

Poetry.com said both original winners were created “with assistance” from AI, changed the results, and redistributed the prizes. The removed poems and writers are no longer reliably identifiable. The names on the current result pages are the replacements, not the accused entrants.

SUSPECTED OR DISPUTED

🇬🇧 Short story The Serpent in the Grove by Jamir Nazir — Commonwealth Short...