{"id":525829,"date":"2026-07-05T04:19:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T04:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/525829\/"},"modified":"2026-07-05T04:19:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T04:19:15","slug":"ai-has-ruined-literary-prizes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/525829\/","title":{"rendered":"AI has ruined literary prizes"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, run by the UK-based Commonwealth Foundation, gave its<\/a> annual award to Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir for his short story \u201cThe Serpent in the Grove\u201d. Established to spotlight new voices from underrepresented parts of the Commonwealth, the prize is intended to elevate writers from regions often overlooked in global publishing circuits. Nazir\u2019s story supposedly had just the underrepresented qualities they were looking for.<\/p>\n

Nazir\u2019s name will be familiar to some because in May the prize, which had an agreement with prestigious UK-based literary magazine Granta to publish its finalists, was found<\/a> to have shortlisted at least three howlers that were most likely generated by AI. In particular, Nazir\u2019s \u201cThe Serpent in the Grove\u201d quickly attracted attention for its chatbot syntax and bizarre lines such as \u201cShe had the kind of walking that made benches become men.\u201d Granta\u2019s human readership \u2014 rather than its editors or Commonwealth\u2019s professional-writer judges \u2014 were the ones to cry foul.<\/p>\n

After being run through AI-detection software, \u201cThe Serpent in the Grove\u201d and two other short stories were found to be entirely or almost entirely generated by AI. Nazir\u2019s photograph appeared to be AI-generated as well, a falsification to which Nazir later admitted. \u201cThat definitely had AI in it,\u201d he said to writer Kevin Hosein in now-deleted screenshots, \u201cbecause I had taken that shot with an old t-shirt on and guys in India wanted a picture to put because I was supposed to be on a board of directors for another company and they used that by putting the suit and maybe cleaning up the beard.\u201d The explanation raises more questions than it answers. Why was Nazir impersonating a board member for an Indian company? Does this convoluted stratagem suggest the skills of a prize-winning writer?<\/p>\n

During the initial scandal, Granta released a statement to journalists, distancing itself from the controversy. \u201cGranta editors have no control over the selection of the Commonwealth Prize stories, and nor are they involved in choosing the jury,\u201d the journal\u2019s publisher, Sigrid Rausing, explained. Rausing also struck an arch tone, musing: \u201cIt may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism \u2014 we don\u2019t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.\u201d On 19 June, however, Granta announced<\/a> an end to its partnership with the Commonwealth Foundation. \u201cFor the sake of our own editorial integrity, the Granta Trust board has now taken the decision that we will no longer engage in external publishing partnerships,\u201d a prepared statement read.<\/p>\n

Since May, the \u201call-star judging panel\u201d of another prestigious publication, the UK edition of the magazine Harper\u2019s Bazaar, has fallen<\/a> for AI content. The magazine flew \u201cwriter\u201d Kavyta Kay to Burgh Island, off the coast of Devon, for a stay in the Burgh Island Hotel as a reward for winning first place in its short story competition. Talk about bizarre: her Nazir-like tale, \u201cBack and Forth\u201d, was also found by writer Nabeel S. Qureshi \u2014 the first to discover Nazir\u2019s AI \u2014 to be 100% AI-generated.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no formula to a successful short story,\u201d Ruth Ozeki, the award-winning novelist and head judge of the Harper\u2019s prize, said,<\/a> announcing the winner. \u201cBut whatever its strength is going to be \u2014 whether plot, a narrative voice or poetic language \u2014 it must be established quickly.\u201d What Kavyta Kay\u2019s AI chatbot established quickly was all the necessary clich\u00e9s and stereotypes that the Leftist mainstream requires in order to ventriloquize the Third World. The piece included wise, anthropomorphic nature (that knowing, waiting tree), tiredness from long walks (the burden of being a non-Westerner), and a connection to animal and bodily instincts (their feet taking them to places they can\u2019t foretell). Not to mention that the story is written in the unmistakable, consolidated unistyle of the modern mainstream. Harper\u2019s Bazaar has yet to release a statement on the scandal.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been hurtling toward this moment for a long time, and may have arrived sooner than we expected. As the publishing-industrial complex<\/a> has long favored bad algorithmic writing \u2014 or what it calls mainstream and upmarket \u2014 a human might be able to venture a few conclusions: publishers and arbiters of taste are not, and have never been, on the side of the individual, only the collective. They care only if humans buy their books, not if they write them. We\u2019re heading for a future in which publishers can pinch a penny by replacing the already small cost of fees and book advances with monthly premium subscriptions to an AI bot. Storytelling will be replaced by corporations generating slop at the click of a mouse. Where we go from there, perhaps only the trees know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, run by the UK-based Commonwealth Foundation, gave its annual award to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":525830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,4193,148535,85,46,425,240334,125,10698],"class_list":["post-525829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-granta","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-literature","tag-literature-prize","tag-technology","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/525830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}