(This story is part of The Hindu on Books newsletter that comes to you with book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. Subscribe here.)Dear reader,Last month, Caribbean writer Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” published in Granta in partnership with the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize, was widely suspected to have been written with the help of AI. It automatically created a firestorm in literary circles. Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing responded to the allegations saying, “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.” And that is where things stand. Many readers argued that the story was poorly written and wondered how it had won the prize. I, too, read the story — or at least tried to. It left me unimpressed, but also confused. In one place, Nazir writes, “A story is a well. It eats sound until somebody throws a rope. If grace is near and hands hold, something breathing comes up. Some stories pull buckets of bone. This one pulled a woman.”I decided that this paragraph, like many others, was either too esoteric for my taste or just incoherent. But I didn’t dwell on it: after all, quality and taste are subjective. We have all had arguments, for instance, about whether a Booker winner truly deserved the prize, why certain deserving authors have been denied the Nobel Prize, and how some hugely popular works are, in fact, rather staid or run-of-the-mill. Indeed, taste is so personal that many others staunchly defend AI-generated stories. They argue that AI is a useful tool for non-writers who want to articulate their thoughts (but writing isn’t the only creative medium), for subject experts who aren’t exactly literary stalwarts (what are ghostwriters for?), and for non-English-speaking people to improve their writing skills (I believe this can only be done with more reading and writing). But even if we accept that literary taste is subjective, the AI debate raises a different question altogether: not whether a piece is good, but what kind of writing we value in the first place. My problem with AI writing — and I see how some journalists are also increasingly relying on it — is how polished and tidy it sounds, intent on wiping out all the imperfections and eccentricities that make us human. If purely human writing is like a waterfall, cascading down uneven rocks while catching the rays of sunlight, AI-generated writing is like a man-made fountain, with water flowing down smooth surfaces in a formulaic loop. It is a simulacrum of thought, glossy but without a heartbeat.