When on Monday there were conversations on social media about a short story written by AI that had supposedly won an award “prestigious literary award“, I opted not to blog about it. I hadn’t heard of the Commonwealth Prize, so how prestigious was it really? Furthermore, there was nothing even close to proof of what was alleged: just some complaints and people trying to prove their point with extremely fallible AI detectors.
But the accusations on social media have already become a scandal, and if The New York Times is writing about this now.I could do it too.
And if you’ve made it this far in a blog post about a short story, you might as well read the short story and form your own opinion. It is called The Serpent in the Grove and is attributed to author Jamir Nazir. It has no paywall and it is. available on the Granta website.
How did you feel when you read the sentence: “Outside, little Puttie, three years old, dark as the sun, bright-eyed, was chasing a bird through the dust, his laugh was like water on pebbles”? I guess you were making fun of perceiving a lot of AI tropes. You may have felt them even if you came to the story cold, but that may not be the case. Be honest: I probably wouldn’t have read a story today if there hadn’t been a scandal.
But here’s a section that seems less likely to have been written by AI:
Puttie, carrying his father on his shoulders and his mother firmly, walks there when work destroys him. He stops before the ring out of respect that has become a habit. Listen: the brook language of the leaves, the slight whistle of the sun, a creak where the wood learns to pretend to be a board and gets tired of pretending.
This is too stylized and fun with grammar to be a typical AI output. But what exactly does that mean for someone who believes an AI model wrote history? Does it refute the whole notion of AI authorship? Does it simply mean that the human author embellished certain parts? Or you? maybe Do you think you could get an AI model to write like that, especially if you gave it an example?
Sigrid Rausing, editor of Granta, published a puzzling and ambiguous statement about the AI accusations, writing, in part, “The judges may have given an award to an AI plagiarism case; we don’t know yet, and we may never know.” But his statement also says he told the story to Claude, and focused on the more human-looking parts, saying they contain “out-of-form specificity” and that AI could have been used to “craft around” those parts.
But again, wow, Who really cares what Claude thinks about this?
The director general of the foundation that administers the Commonwealth Prize, Razmi Farookspoke to the New York Times and also kept things fairly ambiguous, saying that his organization “has taken stock of the feedback” and that there has been some internal soul-searching “to see if we feel our process to date has been robust enough.” While their foundation is “confident in the rigor” of their AI verification process, they note that it is an “evolving technological environment.”
There are now other stories on the Granta website accused of online AI plagiarism, and Granta has added a note to all Commonwealth Prize winners, saying in part: ““The suggestion that writers have submitted material that is not authentically their own is an allegation we take seriously, but until definitive evidence comes to light we will keep these stories on our website.”
But despite some early accusations to the contrary, Jamir Nazir seems to be a real personbased in Trinidad and Tobago. If you used AI to write the story, the “prestigious” award paid you more in prestige than money. He received £2,500 for his efforts as he was the winner of the Caribbean regional award. The overall winner, who will receive £5,000, will not be announced until June 30.
Due to the intensity of online debates, particularly about book subredditsIt seems that eventually someone will track down Nazir and get him to confess or write an affidavit signed in blood swearing that he wrote it all himself.
In any case, it’s doubtful that the people who are upset about this will get the vindication they want. Even if Nazir is guilty, he can simply deny it or, more in line with what people tend to do in this situation, claim that he accepted suggestions here and there from an LLM, but that he is still the real perpetrator.
Meanwhile, people surely have a lot of strong opinions about a short story. And if the truth is that Nazir writes like an LLM, what a way to find out.
