{"id":438015,"date":"2026-05-21T07:50:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T07:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/438015\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T07:50:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T07:50:10","slug":"the-scandal-over-a-supposedly-ai-written-award-winning-short-story-is-troubling-or-just-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/438015\/","title":{"rendered":"The Scandal Over a Supposedly AI-Written, Award-Winning Short Story Is Troubling. Or Just Mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When there was social media chatter on Monday about an AI-written short story supposedly having won a \u201cprestigious literary prize<\/a>,\u201d I opted not to blog about it. I hadn\u2019t heard of the Commonwealth Prize, so how prestigious was it really? Plus, there was nothing even close to proof of what was being alleged\u2014just some complaints, and people trying to prove their point with extremely fallible<\/a> AI detectors.<\/p>\n

But the social media allegations have metastasized into a scandal by now, and if the New York Times is now writing about this<\/a>, I might as well too.<\/p>\n

And if you\u2019ve gotten this far into a blog post about a short story, you might as well read the short story and form your own opinion. It\u2019s called The Serpent in the Grove, and credited to the author Jamir Nazir. It\u2019s not paywalled, and is available on the Granta website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How did you feel when you read the sentence, \u201cOutside, little Puttie \u2013 three years old, sun-dark, bright-eyed \u2013 chased a yard fowl through dust, his laughter like water over pebbles\u201d? I\u2019m guessing you scoffed, perceiving many AI tropes. You might have sensed these even if you came to the story cold, but then again you might not have. Be honest: you probably wouldn\u2019t have read a short story today at all if there were no scandal.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s a section that seems less likely to have been written by AI:<\/p>\n

Puttie, carrying his father in shoulders and his mother in steadiness, walks there when work shatters him. He stops short of the ring out of respect turned habit. He listens: the brook language of leaves, sun\u2019s thin hiss, a creak where wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending.<\/p>\n

This is too stylized and playful with grammar to be a typical AI output. But what does that mean exactly to someone who thinks an AI model wrote the story? Does it disprove the whole notion of AI authorship? Does it just mean the human author embellished certain parts? Or do you maybe feel like you could get an AI model to write like that, particularly if you fed it an example?<\/p>\n

Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta, released a puzzling, ambiguous statement<\/a> about the AI accusations, writing, in part, \u201cIt may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism \u2013 we don\u2019t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.\u201d But her statement also says she fed the story into Claude, and it zeroed in on the more human-seeming parts, saying they contain \u201coff-shape specificity\u201d and that AI could potentially have been used to \u201celaborate around\u201d those parts.<\/p>\n

But then again, wow, truly who cares what Claude thinks about this?<\/p>\n

The director-general of the foundation that administers the Commonwealth Prize, Razmi Farook<\/a>, spoke to the New York Times, and also kept things pretty ambiguous, saying her organization has, \u201ctaken stock of the comments,\u201d and that there\u2019d been some internal soul-searching \u201cto see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough.\u201d While her foundation is \u201cconfident in the rigor\u201d of its AI-checking process, they note that this is an \u201cevolving technological environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are now other stories on the Granta website being accused of AI plagiarism online, and Granta has added a note to all the Commonwealth Prize winners, saying in part, \u201cThe suggestion that writers have submitted material not authentically their own is a charge we take seriously, but until definite evidence comes to light we will keep these stories on our website.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But despite some early accusations to the contrary, Jamir Nazir does appear to be a real person<\/a>, based in Trinidad and Tobago<\/a>. If he did use AI to write the story, the \u201cprestigious\u201d award paid more in prestige than money. He got \u00a32,500 for his trouble, since he was the Caribbean regional prizewinner. The all-around winner, who gets \u00a35,000, won\u2019t be announced until June 30.<\/p>\n

From the intensity of the discussions online, particularly on book subreddits<\/a>, it does seem like, eventually, someone is going to track down Nazir and get him to either confess or write a legal affidavit signed in blood swearing he wrote it all himself.<\/p>\n

At any rate, it\u2019s doubtful the people who are upset about this are going to get the vindication they want. Even if Nazir is guilty, he can just deny, or\u2014more in keeping with what people in this situation tend to do\u2014claim he took suggestions here and there from an LLM, but that he\u2019s still the true author.<\/p>\n

In the meantime people sure have a lot of strong opinions about a short story. And if the truth is that Nazir just kinda writes like an LLM, what a way to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When there was social media chatter on Monday about an AI-written short story supposedly having won a \u201cprestigious…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,1173,5712,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-438015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-fiction","tag-literature","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}