In January 2024, Rie Kudan won the Akutagawa Prize — Japan's most prestigious literary award for debut fiction — for her novel 'Tokyo-to Dojo-to.' In her acceptance speech, she casually mentioned that roughly 5% of the book's sentences were written verbatim from ChatGPT output. The literary establishment reacted with shock. Judges said they had found the writing 'chillingly perfect' and wondered if that was now explained. Kudan argued AI was a legitimate creative tool. The incident reignited global debate about where AI assistance ends and authorship begins.