In early May, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners for its influential Short Story Prize, which recognizes unpublished short fiction. One of the awardees, a Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir, was accused of A.I.-assisted cheating by a broad array of social-media users who seized upon his story\u2019s synthetic tics, glitchy metaphors, and general unreadability. (\u201cThey called her Zoongie,\u201d one passage from the story goes. \u201cMaybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.\u201d) In a statement, Razmi Farook, the director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, said that contestants had confirmed to the Foundation that they had not used A.I., and that the authors of the short-listed stories had made this attestation twice. The next day, on a call with the Times, Farook allowed that the moment had perhaps come to \u201clook at ourselves internally to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shortly after Nazir\u2019s story, \u201cThe Serpent in the Grove,\u201d appeared online, in the British magazine Granta, Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, ran it through the A.I.-detection platform Pangram, which flagged one hundred per cent of the text as likely to have been A.I.-generated. Two of the other winning entries, by the Maltese author John Edward DeMicoli and the Indian author Sharon Aruparayil, were similarly implicated. (Aruparayil denied using A.I. to write her story \u201cMehendi Nights,\u201d calling the allegations \u201can entertaining witch-hunt.\u201d) In an interview<\/a> with the Observer responding to the scandal, Nazir said that his writing process consists largely of speech-to-text dictation on an Android phone. (He cited chronic-health conditions that make sustained typing impossible, and he\u2019s published at least one poem about neuropathy to his Facebook page.) The publisher of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, put out a statement noting that the team had asked the A.I. program Claude about the provenance of \u201cThe Serpent in the Grove\u201d but couldn\u2019t say for sure whether \u201cthe judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of A.I. plagiarism\u2014we don\u2019t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.\u201d<\/p>\n Epistemically, there is something a bit wobbly about using chatbots to determine whether a piece of prose was written by chatbots. A Stanford study found, in 2023, that A.I.-detecting algorithms tend to be biased against non-native English speakers. Still, as Mollick put it on Bluesky, \u201cCome on, if you know you know.\u201d According to internet lore, A.I.-generated writing can be recognized by a handful of tells, memorably enumerated<\/a> by Sam Kriss in the Times magazine in 2025. These include anaphora, when words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, and epistrophe, when words repeat at the end of successive clauses. Nazir\u2019s piece features both. \u201cNo fan, no bulb, no hum,\u201d one line begins. \u201cBush kept it, snakes liked it,\u201d another starts. And: \u201cWater took her and would not return her.\u201d<\/p>\n Then there is zeugma, when a verb takes two objects, one literal and one figurative. Throughout the story, air is \u201csweet with cane and forgetting\u201d and the mouth of a well is \u201cboarded with ply and chance,\u201d as if a magnet is pulling the sentence away from material reality. Finally, negative parallelism, the \u201cnot x but y\u201d construction, which is much reviled by human L.L.M. detectors for its ubiquity in A.I.-generated prose, is all over \u201cThe Serpent in the Grove\u201d: laughter is said to \u201ccut a hush, not cure it,\u201d and Nazir writes that \u201cbush took him in\u2014not like a mother, like a judge.\u201d These rhetorical devices exploit our learned associations between certain types of repetition in prose and heightened meaning; they also create a pulse we feel in our bodies. If they recur in automated text, it\u2019s because they recur in human writing, but in the fake stuff they\u2019re decoupled from content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In early May, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners for its influential Short Story Prize, which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470176,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[15173,365,363,72530,364,237760,5712,111,139,69,6182,145],"class_list":["post-470175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-a-i","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence-a-i","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-granta","tag-literature","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-stories","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470175","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=470175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}