A few syntactical tics – and the verdict of an AI detection platform – have sparked furore over the possibility that a short story given a prestigious literary award was written by AI.
The foundation that awarded the prize and Granta, the magazine that published the winning story, said they had considered the allegations and had not reached a conclusion as to whether they were true.
“It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know,” said Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta.
The story in question, The Serpent in the Grove, was named as the winning entry for the Commonwealth prize from the Caribbean on Saturday and published in Granta magazine.
In “a voice of restraint and quiet authority”, according to the judging committee, it narrates an intense episode in a troubled marriage, and is set in a farmhouse next to an enchanted grove.
Shortly after it was published, internet sleuths – and a few literary critics – seized upon the work and its author, Jamir Nazir, reportedly a 61-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago with few publications to his name.
Ethan Mollick, a professor at Wharton in the US, wrote on Bluesky: “100% AI generated story just won the Commonwealth prize for the Caribbean region,” calling this “a Turing test of sorts”. As evidence, he cited Pangram, an AI detector, which said the work was AI-generated, but he added: “Come on, if you know you know.”
Another commentator, previously employed at Palantir, said there were “plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing” in the story, including a litany of “not x, but y” sentence structures, by now a familiar trope of AI writing.
Other pundits dug into what appeared to be Nazir’s LinkedIn profile, where he discusses matters including the AI arms race and AI replacing jobs.
The accusations are one more episode in an ongoing, frenetic conversation about whether artists and creators are passing off AI-generated work as their own – and whether publications will be able to reliably catch them doing it.
In late March, the New York Times cut ties with a freelance journalist who admitted to having used artificial intelligence to author a book review, which appeared to echo elements of a book review published in the Guardian.
Meanwhile, the publisher Hachette cancelled the release of a debut horror novel, Shy Girl, over concerns it was written at least partially with AI.
Episodes such as these have fuelled discourse around the telltale signs of AI writing – words such as “delve”, a profusion of em dashes, and “vague, soft intensifiers”, for instance “quietly powerful” and “deeply transformative”.
They have also generated energetic business for a new cottage industry of AI detectors such as Pangram, which purport to be able to separate machine prose from human efforts. While Pangram performs well in controlled tests, research into the efficacy of AI detectors
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