Concerns over the increasingly widespread use of A.I. tools to assist with writing continue to roil the literary world.<\/p>\n
This week, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize<\/a> drew attention from readers who suspected that one of its winning stories, \u201cThe Serpent in the Grove<\/a>,\u201d was written by A.I. Like all five regional winners of the competition, the story was published online by Granta, a British literary journal that has featured work by renowned authors like Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve taken stock of the comments and tried to be very systematic in our understanding of some of the perspectives and tried to look at ourselves internally to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough,\u201d said Razmi Farook, the director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, which administers the prize, in a video call with The New York Times. \u201cWe\u2019re confident in the rigor of our process, but we\u2019re conscious that this is an evolving technological environment.\u201d<\/p>\n Granta, which did not respond to questions sent by The Times before publication, took a different stance in its multiple public statements.<\/p>\n \u201cWe showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was A.I.-generated,\u201d Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta, said in a statement. \u201cThe response was long, concluding that it was \u2018almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Rausing added: \u201cIt may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of A.I. plagiarism \u2014 we don\u2019t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.\u201d<\/p>\n On its website, the magazine posted a statement above each of the five winning stories distancing its editors from the contest\u2019s selection process.<\/p>\n \u201cGranta editors were not involved with these stories or their selection beyond copy-editing them upon receipt,\u201d the statement reads 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<\/p>\n The story\u2019s author, Jamir Nazir, is described in an accompanying bio on Granta\u2019s website as \u201ca prolific poet and author, with books published and others forthcoming.\u201d Among the little other work that Nazir appears to have published is a self-published poetry collection, \u201cNight Moon Love: Poems for All Who Have Loved or Dreamed of Love.\u201d Nazir did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s competition received around 7,800 entries. Of the five chosen as regional winners, one will be named the overall winner on June 30.<\/p>\n The speculation surrounding \u201cThe Serpent in the Grove\u201d came on the heels of news, reported by The Times in March, that Hachette Book Group was halting plans<\/a> to publish \u201cShy Girl,\u201d a horror novel, in the United States, and discontinuing sales of the book in the United Kingdom. The move followed widespread allegations online that its author, Mia Ballard, had relied heavily on A.I.<\/a> to write the book. (Ballard told The Times that an acquaintance she hired to edit a self-published version of \u201cShy Girl\u201d had used A.I., but that she herself did not.)<\/p>\n Earlier this week, The Times also found<\/a> that the author Steven Rosenbaum had included a number of fictitious or misattributed quotes generated by A.I. in his recent nonfiction book about artificial intelligence, \u201cThe Future of Truth.\u201d (In a statement, Rosenbaum said that the book had \u201ca handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes\u201d and that he had started his own investigation.)<\/p>\n Authors have taken varying public stances on the role of A.I. in their creative processes.<\/p>\n The author Coral Hart, for example, has been open about using A.I. to help her write; last year, she self-published more than 200<\/a> romance novels, with the help of Anthropic\u2019s Claude.<\/p>\n The Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk caused a minor uproar in the literary community this week after telling an audience in Poland last week<\/a> that she used A.I. while writing her latest novel. Tokarczuk responded with a statement shared by her publisher.<\/p>\n \u201cI make use of artificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world \u2014 I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts,\u201d Tokarczuk said. \u201cNone of my texts, including the novel that will appear in Polish this fall, has been written with the help of artificial intelligence \u2014 except for using it as a tool for faster preliminary research.\u201d<\/p>\n For publishers and prize juries, A.I. presents a challenge with no clear solutions. The accusations made against \u201cThe Serpent in the Grove\u201d and other works have revealed how tricky it can be to determine whether a work was written by a human.<\/p>\n In the days following the story\u2019s publication, readers on social media and online forums<\/a> pointed out signs of A.I. writing tics<\/a>, such as excessive use of metaphors and similes; nonsensical figurative expressions (one line in particular, \u201cshe had the kind of walking that made benches become men,\u201d drew a lot of flak); and negative parallelism, which is more commonly known as the \u201cnot X, but Y\u201d construction.<\/p>\n