‘Polished and confident, with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line, Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority.’ So said Sharma Taylor, regional judge for the Caribbean winner of this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize, The Serpent in the Grove.
AI is very good at producing, at scale, exactly the sort of stuff that such critics will affect to like. Portentous cadences, look-at-me adjectives, solemnly poetic similes, the sort of thing that people produce when they’re trying to produce ‘fine writing’
But did it? Did it pulse with a voice of restraint and quiet authority? Really? On Monday, Nabeel Qureshi, who describes himself as an ‘entrepreneur writer, and researcher’, declared on X: ‘Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize). ‘Not X, not Y, but Z’ sentences everywhere, the ‘hums’ trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.’
Ethan Mollick, a professor at Penn University, chimed in on Bluesky: ‘In a Turing Test of sorts, it looks like a 100 per cent AI generated story just won the Commonwealth Prize for the Caribbean region.’ He added: ‘Pangram flags at 100 per cent but also, come on, if you know you know.’
