Critics Allege Prize-Winning Story Was Written With AI

A prize-winning short story out of the Caribbean has kicked off a fresh fight over AI in fiction, and no one can say for sure who—or what—wrote it. The Serpent in the Grove, by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad and Tobago, won the Commonwealth short story prize for the Caribbean on Saturday. It was published by Granta magazine, whose publisher Sigrid Rausing now concedes it may be "an instance of AI plagiarism," though there's no proof, the Guardian reports.

Critics and online commentators flagged what they say are machine-like quirks and pointed to Pangram, an AI detector, which labeled the story AI-generated. Others dug up a LinkedIn profile believed to be Nazir's, where he discusses artificial intelligence and automation. On X, former Palantir employee Nabeel Qureshi declared that "a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize," pointing to "obvious markers of AI writing," including "'Not X, not Y, but Z' sentences everywhere" and overuse of the word "hum."

• The book's first lines: "They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees' neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound—as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there."

The Commonwealth Foundation said it didn't run AI checks, arguing unpublished entries can't be handed to third-party tools and that contestants pledged the work was their own. Both the foundation and Granta stress that current detectors are fallible; Granta even ran the text through another AI system, which hedged that it seemed neither fully human nor fully machine-written. Rausing noted that there is "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."

• The Commonwealth Foundation said Wednesday that it was carrying out "a thorough, transparent review of the selection process," the Independent reports. "We are aware of allegations and discussion regarding generative AI and our Short Story Prize," said Razmi Farook, the foundation's director general. "We take these claims seriously and are committed to responding to them with care and transparency."