Another day, another literary scandal involving AI. It has been alleged that the judges of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize have been duped by an author using AI in his winning entry. Jamir Nazir’s The Serpent in the Grove, which won for the Caribbean region, was then published in leading literary magazine Granta, along with other winning entries.
Almost immediately, it attracted accusations of being AI generated. Users on X posted screenshots of reports from AI detection tool Pangram, which claim 100% of the text was AI authored. Of course, the reliability of such tools can’t be guaranteed.
Sigrid Rausing, publisher of Granta, which was not involved in selecting the story, said in a statement that she showed the story to Claude.ai and asked if it was A.I.-generated. “The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.’” Again, this may tell us nothing. The New York Times and the Guardian have contacted Nazir for a response to the allegations, but they report he has not responded.
Where does this leave literary prizes, literary writing, and the literary short story?
Razmi Farook, the Commonwealth Foundation’s director general, has defended the integrity of the prize’s judging process. Using AI checkers on unpublished submissions “would raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership”. Competitions like the Commonwealth Prize, she notes, must operate on a “principle of trust”.
