Can AI Win Short-Story Prizes Now?

This article first appeared in Book Gossip, a newsletter about what the literati are really thinking. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every month.

Here’s the type of story we’re regrettably about to see more of: On May 16, the Commonwealth Foundation, an organization providing grants and other resources to Commonwealth nations, announced the regional winners of its Short Story Prize, awarded to works of unpublished short fiction; the overall winner will be decided in June. A few days later, the winning entry from the Caribbean, “The Serpent in the Grove,” by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad, was drawing attention online not for its “lyrical precision and haunting atmosphere,” as the prize committee put it, but because some people thought it, and other prize-winning stories, reads uncomfortably like AI-generated text. “It’s hard to explain exactly why, but it certainly feels AI, or at least inhuman, to anyone who reads it,” the writer Rory McCarthy told me when I asked what made him suspect its nonhuman authorship, pointing to its “constant ersatz kitchy ‘lyricism.’”

The story, which was published on the British literary magazine Granta’s site after being selected, is set in rural Trinidad and involves a woman named Sita’s brush with death when she falls into a well at the edge of her property. It is crammed with metaphor and simile. “Shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesn’t rinse,” the narrator says when Sita’s philandering husband, Vishnu, waits for her in a medical clinic. Some descriptions are significantly less elegant, even bizarre: “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink”; “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” There are other hallmarks of AI writing, like negative parallelisms (“But the grove isn’t a ledger; it’s a mouth. It closes only when it’s satisfied”) and anaphora, or the repetition of words at the beginning of successive sentences or clauses (“The shelf didn’t look like freedom — she couldn’t afford that word yet. It looked like not dying. It looked like not returning to a house where people forgot to see you”).

In a statement shared with New York Magazine today, Razmi Farook, director general of the Commonwealth Foundation, says the prize committee does not use AI checkers in the judging process, calling those programs “not unfailing or infallible.” (Several people online said that AI-checking tools deemed “The Serpent in the Grove” to be 100 percent AI generated, though some studies show how these tools can easily lead to false accusations of LLM use.) “All shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used and, upon further consultation, the Foundation has confirmed this,” the statement reads. “We place our confidence in the integrity of our contributors and the calibre and experience of the judges and Chair of the Judging panel, and stand by the assurances given by our authors as part of our process.”

In a concurrent statement sent this morning, Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing was less sure, writing that she and her colleagues ran the story through Claude, which concluded that it was “almost certainly” written with the help of an AI tool, though it might have a “human core.” “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism — we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know,” she writes. “There is, however, a certain irony in the fact that beyond human hunches AI itself is the most efficient tool we have for revealing what is AI generated.” A representative from Granta confirmed that its editors did not participate in the selection or editing of the prize-winning stories beyond copyediting, and Nazir did not respond to a request for comment. Stories submitted to the Commonwealth Short Story prize are judged anonymously.

Nazir, a business consultant who used to work in the office of Trinidad & Tobago’s prime minister, per LinkedIn, published a book of poems a few years ago called Night Moon Love: Poems for All Who Have Loved or Dreamed of Love. His poetry strikes a different, less abstract tone than his winning story; in one, called “Tribute to My Wife,” he writes, “If ever a man be blessed, then I be he. / I live in constant happiness, / as heaven lies in your arms.” On his public social-media pages, he posts often about AI and seems to sometimes use it to write. His uncannily symmetrical author photo, too, appears to be AI generated. But, of course, that’s all just speculation. Meanwhile, Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk talked about using LLMs in her writing process at an event in Poland last week, saying “in fluid literary fiction, this technology is an asset of incredible proportions,” and March saw the cancellation of the novel Shy Girl after allegations it was written with AI. Like it or not, it seems the serpent’s out of the grove.