One of the winners of this year’s prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize has been accused of using artificial intelligence to write his entry, “Serpent in the Grove”.
The Commonwealth Foundation announced the winners of its prestigious Short Story Prize on May 13. The foundation announced five winning stories from Africa, Asia, the USA and Canada, and the Caribbean and Pacific regions before the announcement of an overall winner.
Aside from a small cash award, each winning writer’s story is published on the Granta website, a famed London-based literary magazine.
Granta has a long and storied history of publishing the early works of authors who eventually make their way into the literary canon. Sylvia Plath, EM Forster and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie feature among a long list of acclaimed writers who were “launched” by the magazine.
However, Granta is not involved in the selection process for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, but publication in its pages lays the path for the winning writers to find their audience.
This year’s winner from the Caribbean region, a Trinidadian man, Jamir Nazir, was one of the five selected from 7,806 entries this year.
Just days after the Short story was published on Granta, readers noticed something odd about Nazir’s writing.
Many readers pointed out that he wrote lines that at best were vague, for example: “Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc”, “Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth”, and at worst, completely incomprehensible “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink”.
Sharma Taylor, the judge for the Caribbean region, said the story was selected for Nazir’s “sublime” language, “precise yet richly evocative, conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy”.
But Granta’s readers disagreed.
One researcher on X wrote, “Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize”, adding that the sentence construction and language were obvious markers of AI writing.”
Another reader said, “the Granta AI thing reads like a literal parody of MFA lit”, as another lamented that the “Commonwealth Prize has lost its credibility.”
Wading into the controversial conversation, Pangram, a company offering artificial intelligence detection tools, ultimately ran “Serpent in the Grove” through its systems, along with all the other winners. According to their results, 100 per cent of the text was authored by AI.
That wasn’t all: Pangram also said two other stories, Malta writer John Edward DeMicoli’s “The Bastion’s Shadow” and Indian writer Sharon Aruparayil’s “Mehendi Nights”, were also deemed likely to have been written by AI.
Aruparayil denied the allegations, while Nazir and DeMicoli have not responded at the time of publication. It is worth noting that Pangram and other AI detection tools are not considered entirely accurate.
Facing the controversial allegations, the Commonwealth Foundation released a statement saying the judging process was “robust” and that the writers “personally stated that no AI was used”.
In contrast, Granta’s publisher Sigrid Rausing made the irony-laden decision to pass the story through Claude.ai, which concluded that “Serpent in the Grove” was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human”. (All generative AI – AI that creates new content based on patterns in data – requires human prompts.)
Despite the Commonwealth’s statement, online critics believe the prize’s prestige has been sullied.
