Mo Yan (left) and Yu Hua (Photo: Screenshot of the video from thepaper.cn)
Chinese Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan had sought the assistance of ChatGPT for help to write a prize citation for another famous Chinese writer Yu Hua, Mo revealed during the 65th anniversary of the Chinese literary bimonthly (six times a year) magazine Shouhuo (Harvest) in Shanghai on Tuesday.
Yu Hua, author of two of the most popular modern Chinese literature novels To Live and Brothers, had recently earned the prestigious top prize for the novel ranking in 2021 with his new novel Wen Cheng (The Lost City) published in 2021.
Mo Yan shared their long-standing friendship and reminisced about various stories they had experienced together.
During the ceremony, as an award presenter for Yu, Mo was tasked with delivering a compelling prize citation.
"I spent several days trying to write one but failed, so I asked a PhD student to make ChatGPT write one for me," Mo said, adding that after he put in the key words including "To Live," "extract a tooth" and "Wen Cheng," the chatbot immediately created a prize citation of over 1,000 words, written in a Shakespearean style.
The reason for Mo to choose the three key phrases is that "To Live" is one of Yu's most famous novels, "extract a tooth" refers to the fact that Yu used to be a dentist before he became a writer, and "Wen Cheng" symbolized Yu's latest novel, which merited the prize at the ceremony.
