Granta published a likely AI-written story as a prize finalist
by Ellsworth Toohey · Boing BoingEthan Mollick, the Wharton professor who studies AI adoption, ran "The Serpent in the Grove" through Pangram — an AI-detection tool that claims 99% accuracy — and got 100% red flags. The story had been selected from 7,806 entries as a Caribbean regional finalist for the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize and published in Granta.
Its author, Jamir Nazir, is listed as a 61-year-old Trinidadian writer of East Indian heritage with a self-published 2018 poetry collection on Amazon and almost no other digital footprint — except a LinkedIn profile full of AI evangelism, according to Brittany Allen at Literary Hub.
Nazir's story had a lot of parallelism, epistrophe (repeating a word at the end of successive clauses), and three-part lists — rhetorical tics that LLMs default to.
This rum-shop passage drew particular attention:
Wilfred's rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage's cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.
Louise Doughty, who chaired the judges, said the story had "precise yet richly evocative" language when she selected it.
The Commonwealth Foundation says it's reviewing its selection process. How you review against a tool nobody has figured out yet is the interesting question — Pangram and its competitors are pattern matchers that can flag autistic writers and anyone else whose prose style statistically resembles LLM output.
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