On the other hand, don’t editors sometimes change whole paragraphs, or even rearrange whole chapters? A finished book is never solely the work of its author in all its little details, I believe.
It’s very hard to find the line beyond which something stops being an original creation, to be honest. I don’t think there is one simple answer.
There’s a difference between an actual human person who can think editing and leaving editing to a program. I also would not trust edit suggestions that any machine makes. Google Docs has always been pretty bad, but it’s gotten way worse the past couple years. I don’t know if it exactly coincided with the advent of AI getting big, my memory’s terrible plus I don’t tend to learn news until it’s already not recent anymore, but I’m pretty sure it was around then. And seeing all the stuff about AI not just being wrong but confidently asserting incorrect info as correct and/or trying to gaslight the user about never having given incorrect info at all (sure, since it’s a machine it doesn’t have intent, but it still “knows” what it said earlier in the convo from the logs, so it counts), or that time a mental health site (for eating disorders, I think?) fired their staff and replaced them with a chatbot that within days started spewing stuff that would actively feed the user’s disorder instead of try to help them so the company had to do away with it, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was linked.
Rarely, sure, Google Docs will suggest a word that I like better, but mostly it’s stuff that doesn’t even make sense (it hates when I have someone quirk a smile—it wants them to quake a smile instead), it hates any sort of intensifier, or any sort of creative liberty taken even when it’s still grammatical, and hell recently it’s taken to suggesting stuff that straight-up isn’t even remotely grammatical at all. And on top of that, it doesn’t even catch all my typos, including the ones that don’t end up being real words. I have their suggestions turned off on desktop, and, man, I wish I could on mobile.
Machines cannot think. Some might be good at spitting out stuff that sounds natural, especially if you don’t know enough to know better, like DeepL and Chat GPT, but you can’t replace a human’s ability to think and feel, which is essential for proper writing and editing. Creative writing isn’t just about “100% correct, grammatical” writing (which AI demonstrates that it doesn’t necessarily know anyway) but also viscerality and emotional impact. You’re better off using no editor at all than AI.
Oh I never meant AI can replace a human editor - in my opinion AI can’t and shouldn’t replace anyone at all. I agree with all that you’ve said.
What I was saying was that since an author already allows someone else to edit their text, we could argue that it’s not as important as it initially seems that every word and every sentence has been written by the author with no outside help. If an author chooses to copy text from AI, or allow AI to rephrase a whole paragraph, my belief and hope is that the author will look at AI’s output and make a decision on whether it expresses what they were trying to say better than the original text. So there’s still a human being making decisions, and AI is just a tool, as it should be.
Now if someone just decides to write gibberish and then feed it to a chatbot to make it presentable, that’s a different story. Or gives a few prompts (murder, butler, poison) and lets the AI make a story out of those.
I finished 1R1分34秒 | L32, and really enjoyed it! It was all about boxing and the narrator’s internal world and identity as a boxer. I gave it 4 stars and would recommend it! I wrote a longer review here:
This was also the 18th Akutagawa prize book I’ve finished, and looking back I see that I rated 12/18 books 4 or 5 stars and another 4/18 with 3 stars - so many of these books have been awesome reads. 
I created a list of Akutagawa Prize winners at Akutagawa Prize 芥川龍之介賞 Winners | Japanese list by catbus | Natively.
I did not include any that are not in print, unless they had already been added to Natively. There are also a couple I am waiting to add once they have been approved.
Wait, isn’t Akutagawa already a special tag? Brandon added a handful of prize winning book lists way back when.
See here: Japanese Books Difficulty List | Natively
Hahaha, that’s good to know…
Thank you for your service! 
Can you believe it’s already July? That means it’s time for another round of the Akutagawa prize! Shall we try and guess who will win again? 
Here is a list of all the nominees + their blurbs: 第171回「芥川賞・直木賞」の候補作が発表されました！(2024/6/13) | 紀伊國屋書店 - 本の「今」に会いに行こう
Poll! I’ve set it so you can select two choices in case you predict there will be a ダブル受賞.
Bookmeter is also running a prediction poll where you can will 1000 Bookwalker coins if you guess the winners of both the Akutagawa and Naoki correctly (500 for each), so it’s worth a shot entering that too! You have a decent chance at free coins: 第171回芥川賞・直木賞 予想チャレンジ！キャンペーン｜読書メーター-読書メーター公式ブログ
Are there any of the winners that you are interested in checking out this year? I am personally interested in 転の声 since the plot seems unique and the topic of singing and the music industry is is fresh. It is written by the author of the band CreepHyp and I think he was probably able to write a lot from personal experience and has a unique pov (plus I’m a fan of their music).
I am also interested in いなくなくならなくならないで just because the title is like a Japanese learners nightmare. 
I’m pretty sure I voted for something different in the Bookmeter prediction poll. Most likely いなくなくならなくならないで, which sounds fun and like something I might want to read. I might also be interested in 海岸通り.
I am interested in 海岸通り and will probably get that one when I have the time to read it.
いなくなくならなくならないで also sounds interesting and the book cover is pretty good (that’s how I choose half of the books I read), but I will wait for some opinions on it first 
Ooh fun, thanks for posting this.
I vote for いなくなくならなくならないで , mostly because it’s the one I most like the sound of, out of the five.
I think they all sound interesting in their own way. 
The winners were announced today (yesterday?) in Japan and we got a ダブル受賞! 
Congrats to those who guessed
「サンショウウオの四十九日」and I guess no one saw バリ山行 coming.
Any plans to read either winners?
I’ll probably get to both eventually, but I like to wait a while for prices to drop~ Honestly all the nominated books have something that interests me, haha.
Maybe in 2~3 years, when I can get them from the library without an absurd wait list.
I just finished reading the first (title) story in 或る「小倉日記」伝 傑作短編集1 | L30?? which is the short story that won the Akutagawa in 1952. Apparently the author 森鷗外 lived in 小倉 (a town in Kyuushuu) for three years from 1899; this story is about a man who lives in Kokura in the 1940s and devotes himself to trying to track down information about 森’s stay there by finding elderly people who still remember him. It’s written in a rather detached way, recounting this man’s life in an almost biographical style. I think on balance I liked it. Definitely not the hardest thing by the author I’ve read, though not the easiest either. Includes occasional short quotes from 森鷗外 in the original kana usage.
(The book as a whole collects short stories by 松本清張 which are not either his historical fiction or his mystery fiction – the blurb categorises them as 現代小説.)
