An AI brouhaha is brewing in literary quarters. A short story by a Trinidadian writer, as Novi Zhukovsky explains in the Free Press, won the prestigious Commonwealth Prize and was subsequently published in the highbrow literary journal Granta. A hue and AI cry followed, as readers claimed to have detected the telltale signs of AI-generated prose. I myself am not well versed in AI tics and turns of phrase, but the argument that “The Serpent in the Grove” does not appear to have issued from an individual, and immediate, human mind seems plausible.
It would indeed be a scandal if the prize jury mistook slop for the real deal. But I see another scandal here: The prize-winning story, assumed by the judges who selected it to have been crafted by a human writer, is terribly written.
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