Did a Chatbot Write a Prize-Winning Story? Does It Matter?
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the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners for its influential Short Story Prize, which recognizes unpublished short fiction.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’s synthetic tics, glitchy metaphors, and general unreadability. (“They called her Zoongie,” one passage from the story goes. “Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.”) 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 “look at ourselves internally to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough.”
Shortly after Nazir’s story, “The Serpent in the Grove,” 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 “Mehendi Nights,” calling the allegations “an entertaining witch-hunt.”) In an interview 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’s 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 “The Serpent in the Grove” but couldn’t say for sure whether “the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of A.I. plagiarism—we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”
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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, “Come on, if you know you know.” According to internet lore, A.I.-generated writing can be recognized by a handful of tells, memorably enumerated 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’s piece features both. “No fan, no bulb, no hum,” one line begins. “Bush kept it, snakes liked it,” another starts. And: “Water took her and would not return her.”
Then there is zeugma, when a verb takes two objects, one literal and one figurative. Throughout the story, air is “sweet with cane and forgetting” and the mouth of a well is “boarded with ply and chance,” as if a magnet is pulling the sentence away from material reality. Finally, negative parallelism, the “not x but y” construction, which is much reviled by human L.L.M. detectors for its ubiquity in A.I.-generated prose, is all over “The Serpent in the Grove”: laughter is said to “cut a hush, not cure it,” and Nazir writes that “bush took him in—not like a mother, like a judge.” 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’s because they recur in human writing, but in the fake stuff they’re decoupled from content.
“The Serpent in the Grove” is about a farmer, Vishnu, who tricks his wife, Sita, into falling down a well. The story has its share of glaringly nonsensical phrases that should have tipped off anyone paying an iota of attention—for instance, when Vishnu spies a sexy visitor, we learn that the woman “had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” But most of its failures are subtler, more insidious. Sita’s survival is a fact “that felt like a small warm animal in her hands”; the problem isn’t that a reader can’t picture a fact being cradled like an animal—it’s that the image and the thought behind it is maudlin.
Likewise, a comparison of “silence in a village” to “smoke” that “sneaks from something burning” tracks perfectly; the lines are grating not because they’re semantically wonky but because of the ostentation and portentousness with which they dress up a mundane observation. (It’s too quiet outside.) Most of the descriptions aren’t guilty of incoherence—though the L.L.M. discourse sometimes seems to discount how much opacity or illogic readers will forgive under the banner of poetic license—so much as sentimentality or triteness. “First good rain after dry is a forgiveness the sky gives itself,” we’re told. When a child “with cheeks sticky sweet” sees his injured mother, “his face did a thing with no name—opened, broke, opened.” It’s the kind of clumsy grasping at cosmic truths that many human writers also lean on.
Maybe the most fascinating aspect of the story—fascinating because it feels inhuman in a plausible and almost endearing way—is what seems like a fundamental confusion about the kinds of behavior, agency, or interiority that one might expect from inanimate objects, body parts, or concepts. “The grove remembered,” we’re told. “Water is jealous.” “Wood complained.” Online, commenters mocked the description of Vishnu’s fellow-villager, Marsha, who is “big in the way of women who never apologize to furniture.” They lampooned the sentence: “Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission.” Yes, these lines are inelegant, but part of what makes them so strange is what they presume about the inner lives of things and abstractions. How, after all, would “hard living” ask permission? Why would you apologize to furniture?
A surreal machine-generated piece of writing entirely centered on the hopes and dreams of overlooked objects would be entertaining, if nothing else, but Nazir’s story couples the personified benches with human characters of generic blandness. Several embody the mustiest clichés of post-colonial melodrama: a pathetic husband driven to violence, a maternal village woman, a subjugated young bride. (“Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance.”) Backstories are barely sketched in—“Orphan was too kind a word”—and often in the second person, implicitly assigning them to the reader rather than the character: “a house where people forgot to see you.” Statements tend to be axiomatic rather than descriptive of particular individuals. A character in the story doesn’t shrug. He shrugs “the way men shrug when feeling places a hand on the neck and says be still.” The result feels like a statistical approximation of many lived experiences that resembles no single lived experience.
Compare Nazir’s story to a piece of writing by a human: “A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961), by V. S. Naipaul, which was also set in Trinidad. In an early scene, the narrator describes Mr. Biswas’s first impressions of a house on Sikkim Street that he will go on to buy, for more than he can afford, from an unscrupulous legal administrator:
It’s hard to imagine an L.L.M. demonstrating comparable mastery over the tangible details of a physical space. It’s harder still to picture it infusing its output with such envy, aspiration, or simple bewilderment at the varieties of human fortune. When Nazir’s story reaches for a similar effect—portraying how a young child has been changed by his parents’ ordeal—we get: “Years did what years do. Puttie grew and learned to widen his narrowed eyes by choice – for tenderness, for beauty. He climbed cocoa trees without bruising pods. He learned to hear his mother coming by the weight of her good foot and the mercy of her bad.”
For many commenters, these rhapsodically expressed banalities are less offensive than the fact that a group of cultural gatekeepers rubber-stamped the story—that the serpent got into the grove in the first place. As the novelist Will Self and others have written, Fazir’s success suggests an unhealthy literary culture, one that was deteriorating long before the A.I. asteroid hit (and maybe since the dawn of literary culture). Some X users said that the winning entry embodies the tendency of M.F.A. programs to promote a kind of stylistic polish at the expense of substance. One of the judges, Sharma Taylor, praised Nazir’s story in terms that, to many readers, sounded suspiciously bot-like, remarking on his “precise yet richly evocative” language, which conveys “vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy.” That Taylor’s statement also conforms to the conventions of creative-writing-seminar plaudits is part of the problem.
Others take the story’s recognition by the Commonwealth judges as evidence that the literary establishment is guilty of condescending to the Global South. A Substack parody of Nazir’s tale by the Mexican-American writer John Paul Brammer ridiculed the aestheticized representations of poverty and feints at mysticism that prize committees have been charged with rewarding. Brammer’s spoof, which he set in “These Parts,” a cheeky mockup of “Oklahoma or maybe Kansas”, contains the line, “She was the potholes and the boarded-up arcade and the meth and the steepled church and the notion that things used to be better but aren’t so good anymore.” The emulation is spot on, though the satire is somewhat weakened by the fact that, as J. D. Vance can verify, writing in this vein itself garners plenty of praise from patronizing gatekeepers.
Behind these accusations—that creative-writing seminars are vapid credential farms and that literary distinctions are a sham—seems to lie a suspicion that those who prevail in the competitive world of literary fiction are more fashionable than they are honest. Must writers mean what they say? In a lot of ways, the prospect of L.L.M.s churning out prize-winning fiction chills us because it conjures up the spectre of the writer as hack or courtier—someone who writes not out of any desire to express what they’re thinking or feeling but because they want money, admiration, page views, etc., from the completed job. (By the standards of transcendent literary fiction, I’m afraid that most of us working writers are hacks, courtiers, or both.) Externally motivated writers anxiously check on your reactions to their work—“was this response helpful?” “did you like my article?” They flatter your preconceptions and absolve you of your prejudices. They move you by showing you romantic versions of yourself: now you’re a sad child in a home “where people forgot to see you”; now you’re a soulful type who’s predisposed to discover “tenderness” or “mercy” in unexpected places. They don’t test you by showing you who they are, or could be, and who you could be by extension: small-minded, unrelatable, ridiculous, mad at the chickens and children, jealous of the solicitor’s clerk.
If “The Serpent in the Grove” sounds like it was written by a bad writer, that’s because the chatbot that appears to have extruded it was trained on a diet of bad writing. The chatbot would have been asked to produce a short work of post-colonial fiction worthy of a literary prize. It delivered an off-key imitation of the genre’s worst tropes. Lina Abushouk, analyzing the imbroglio for the website Africa Is a Country, observed that the story’s stylistic quirks revealed the formal and expressive qualities that Euro-American publishers expect and demand from African and Caribbean authors. “The scandal is that the existing formulae for ‘authentic’ postcolonial prose are already so codified that a language model can reproduce them convincingly,” Abushouk wrote. “In this way, AI does not disrupt literary taste so much as expose its furniture.”
The threat of A.I.-generated writing is particularly acute in forms such as romance and fantasy novels, which rely heavily on stock characters and scènes à faire. Last year, the romance authors K. C. Crowne and Lena McDonald were widely shamed for forgetting to remove A.I. prompts from their published work. In February, the Times ran a piece about the novelist and writing coach Coral Hart, who teaches aspiring purveyors of happy endings how to craft stories with A.I. Her business, Plot Prose, has served more than sixteen hundred clients, she told the Times, including authors who’ve publicly spoken out against computer-generated fiction but have secretly signed up for her classes. A month later, the publisher Hachette revoked a forthcoming horror novel, “Shy Girl,” whose author, Mia Ballard, was accused of using A.I. as part of her creative process. Many readers didn’t seem to care whether the text was human-authored or not: “Shy Girl,” which was self-published last year, maintained a three-point-three-nine-star average rating on Goodreads even after the controversy broke.
The case for A.I. in fiction tends to be something like: Well, people have always written schlocky or formulaic books. For the past two decades, our reigning cultural ideology has been poptimism—the idea that if a lot of people like a work of art, then it has to be good. Now we have sloptimism, which holds that if there’s a lot of a particular type of art out there and people are engaging with it, and not complaining too much, then how bad can it be? The counterpoint, of course, is that readers deserve better and always have. An A.I. can’t mean what it says, and indeed no human writer can mean what an A.I. writes on her behalf—she can agree with it, she can aspire to it, she can hide behind it, but she can’t mean it. The sloptimists are betting that writing devoid of an inner purpose can rival the stuff ripped out of an author’s chest with a claw grapple. Any serious reader knows that it can’t. ♦