{"id":729698,"date":"2026-08-06T20:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T20:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/729698\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T20:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T20:30:09","slug":"eisteddfod-author-devastated-after-judges-accuse-her-of-using-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/729698\/","title":{"rendered":"Eisteddfod author &#8216;devastated&#8217; after judges accuse her of using AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">BBC Wales has seen confirmation that Wood entered the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize, which is for unpublished novels of at least 50,000 words.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">All entrants in the main literature prizes in the National Eisteddfod compete under pseudonyms, as a part of the festival&#8217;s strict confidentiality rule.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">During the ceremony on Tuesday, judge Meinir Wyn Edwards said there was &#8220;no plan or narrative arc in this novel&#8221; and that the &#8220;clumsy, flawed expression makes the whole thing almost impossible to read&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;So much so, that we suspect an artificial intelligence machine created the novel and that the author didn&#8217;t even bother to read through the work,&#8221; she added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">According to the adjudicators, the novel was placed &#8220;at the bottom of the pile&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In response, the published author told BBC Wales that her novel was a &#8220;personal story&#8221; about her family history, so she was &#8220;devastated&#8221; after hearing the adjudication broadcast live on S4C.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I was devastated when I watched it because there was a whole minute of insults and sarcasm and laughing and this feeling that perhaps it had been written by AI,&#8221; she said. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She added she felt &#8220;personally affronted and upset because, like all writers, I&#8217;m very nervous about my work.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It&#8217;s very personal. I&#8217;ve written for a long time. I&#8217;ve never written in Welsh before.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BBC Wales has seen confirmation that Wood entered the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize, which is for unpublished novels&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":729699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-729698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/729699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}