“Prix Pascal” for AI literature: A prize for superintelligence

The speed with which the major AI companies are announcing ever more groundbreaking breakthroughs is now so breathtaking that even their inventors often appear astonished in the media.

At the same time, there are increasing attempts to normalize the use of AI in all possible and impossible areas of society and to present it as a natural evolutionary stage of an imperfect human species. Elon Musk, Rocket Man and Presidential Rasputin, believes their future lies in a merger into an AI-supported “superintelligence”.

In France, this discourse has now received new fodder, because after the recent upheaval surrounding the fraud case of a novel allegedly written with the help of AI at the “Prix Goncourt”, a new literary prize has now been announced.

The special thing about the “Prix Pascal” is that it specifically aims to honor literary “works” that were written “together with”, i.e. by, AI systems. A yet unknown jury of writers, critics, editors, philosophers and journalists will choose the best machine text and, in addition to prize money, will support its “creator” in publishing his “work”. But isn't there more AI political calculation behind it than an actual love of literature?

One wonders whether the recently disgraced Haitian-Canadian author Thélyson Orélien could also apply for the test tube prize named after the mathematician, writer and philosopher Blaise Pascal. Until recently, Orélien had denied using AI for his widely read work “It was this or die,” even after the Prix Goncourt removed it from the longlist.

Now his publisher “Éditions du Boréal” has confirmed Orélien’s use of AI and no longer wants to work with the author. But: The damage is done. The institutions, including his publishers, as well as the committees of the Prix Goncourt have thoroughly embarrassed themselves. Because at first no one seemed to have noticed the fraud.

The “Prix Pascal” website only wants to acknowledge such disruptions as supposedly positive ones. “Cultural inclusion through AI” is praised because now, according to the organizers, everyone is finally capable of producing literature and it should no longer depend on the level of education, class, or reading and spelling difficulties (no joke) as to who can call themselves a writer.

So a democratization of fiction and overcoming elitist gatekeepers? What is of course obscured is the fact that the development of text-generating LLMs was preceded by a theft of intellectual achievement on a scale that is probably unparalleled in the history of humanity. And of course AI tokens are not free either.

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So the self-portrayal of the “Prix Pascal” seems like a mockery in two respects: “The prize honors works that bring something new, that do not simply reproduce a format that has already been produced in the past.”

LLMs are incapable of creating anything new precisely because they are based on training data from existing works and do nothing other than reproduce what is known - even if this is no longer as easy to recognize - even for juries like Goncourt's - as it was at the beginning of the AI ​​era.

Cases like Orélien’s show how overwhelmed literary institutions are with the “AI revolution” – and not just in France. Without Pangram, an AI-based detector of texts generated by LLMs, Orélien's attempt at deception might never have come to light.

As is so often the case in neoliberalism, the damage is borne by society as a whole, in this case the literary world, the authors and readers. Rowohlt Verlag, which has already had Orélien's work translated, has not yet made a decision as to whether the publication might be withdrawn.

One can only speculate as to how much literature and its continued existence are important to the group of tech entrepreneurs behind the “Prix Pascal”. In addition to an orphaned Instagram account, the prize is otherwise only presented on the business network LinkedIn.