AlphaPolis, a Japanese light novel and manga publisher, announced that it has cancelled plans for the book publication and manga adaptation of the winner of its 18th AlphaPolis Fantasy Novel Awards’ Grand Prize and Reader’s Choice awards (source: Otaku Soken). The winning entry, Modest Skill “Tidying Up” is the Strongest! ~ Corporate Slave Office Lady Started An Accidental Isekai Revolution, and is Now Adored by the Head Knight and His Majesty the Emperor (unofficial translation), was discovered to be predominantly AI-generated, which goes against AlphaPolis’s updated contest guidelines.
The guidelines were updated on November 18, 2025, to exclude AI-generated works after last year’s contest, likely due to the sharp rise in AI-generated content across the platform and the rights issues AlphaPolis could possibly face should they release them commercially. Despite the ban on AI resulting in the cancellation of the physical edition and manga adaptation of Tidying Up, the light novel is still marked as a contest winner and available to read on AlphaPolis.
According to the author, though the publication and adaptation plans for the novel were scrapped in light of the guideline updates, they do not view this as a loss. Instead, they see it as an opportunity to become “freer and newer.” They state that they want to keep making interesting works that people will view as something that can only be created “in collaboration” with AI.
On the other hand, AlphaPolis launched a “Novel AI Proofreading” program that checks for things like typos and misused idioms in September last year. While this does little more than review the format of entries, it could hint that the company’s stance on AI prohibition only focuses on actually generating written content, while using AI as an assistive writing tool seems to be generally encouraged.
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It’s an odd situation. If they work was good enough to win it should still be published. On the obi strip just make sure you label it as AI. But in doing so would lower the reputation of the brand so it makes sense to cancel it.
If it is good who cares, for the ones that says AI is copying other stories and writers, guess what, we all do, there are no real new ideas, almost every story has some debt owed to some other story, situation, or idea trust me I have this useless compendium of almost everything I have ever read, watched or heard ever since I was a kid and so many stories borrow from one another some times intentionally and some maybe sometimes subconsciously nothing is really original, logically it makes sense are minds are basically organic computers we actually similar to AI just at a much slower pace.
Interesting that they don’t want AI to write a story but use it themselves, that ahouts double standard. If AI helps write it, then AI generated at least a part of it. How is that different from AI writing with the user’s prompts? The AI is still involved with the writing. It’s like saying driving a car with standard gear shift or automatic is two different things. It is still the same.
I mean not surprising since almost every isakai is just the same 20 tropes uncreatively rehashed. It’s like how country was the first music genre to get tricked with an AI singer.
There’s so much content out there that you can’t read it all in your lifetime. We dont need AI to copy other stories for us. We are capable of doing that ourselves. People will say nothing is new, but at one point it was new. If AI takes over there really won’t ever be anything new. There’s no point in polluting creative spaces with generated content. It defeats the purpose of getting people to be creative.
“We couldn’t tell this Isekai was AI generated.”
And People wonder why so many call Anime generic slop…
What apps or websites do people use to make AI-generated novels? I’ve been trying to figure that out for a minute. I tried ChatGPT and it does really good for chapter one and two, but after that the quality drops, details start getting skipped, and stuff gets left out. I’m not trying to publish anything, it’s just for me.
There is a pretty big difference between a human taking inspiration from works and including them in their art, and a LLM churning out phrases it associated with certain keywords.
No matter how much these AI companies try to dress it up, AI is not capable of feeling or thinking. It’s just doing math. I like to think human creativity is a little more special than that.