Discussion

• @nabeelqu Nabeel S. Qureshi on x

  Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize). “Not X, not Y, but Z” sentences everywhere, the “hums” trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing. A major milestone for AI, at any rate... @GrantaMag [image]

• @serialsevens @serialsevens on x

  Not only is the award-winning short story AI-generated, but so is the author's headshot ... we might be witnessing one of the great literary frauds [image]

• @krishnanrohit Rohit on x

  Extraordinary response. As a famous award winning short story writer would say, this is not just constructing the funeral pyre, but actively lighting the match. [image]

• @cwfcreatives @cwfcreatives on x

  ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ by Jamir Nazir is a story set in rural Trinidad about a struggling farmer, a silenced young wife and a grove that seems to remember what others try to bury. Awarded the Caribbean regional winner title for its lyrical precision and haunting atmosphere, […

• @krishnanrohit Rohit on x

  This is truly embarrassing. I know not everyone is equally proficient or understand how AI works, but seriously, “I asked AI if it was AI” is worse than if they just left it up and stayed out of it. [image]

• @albatrossalex @albatrossalex on x

  My two favourite terrible sentences from this are “she had the kind of walking that made benches become men” and “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” Who read this and thought “wow, what a beautiful image”?????? WHAT IS SUNRISE OVER A SINK SUPPOSED TO BE

• @curtis_yarvin Curtis Yarvin on x

  Lmao AI eating the literary race-slop industry. I love technology Uncle Ted was bad and wrong. Hilarious black mark for @GrantaMag who deserves it for publishing this dated slop genre at all

• @nabeelqu Nabeel S. Qureshi on x

  To demonstrate, here are two screenshots from Claude about the ‘paragraph about the acre’, which the Granta response cites as sounding human. In #1, the model confidently argues that it's ‘likely human’. In #2, with modified prompt, it confidently argues the paragraph is AI. [ima…

• @delicious_tacos @delicious_tacos on x

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race

• @krishnanrohit Rohit on x

  If the judges had any artistic merit or ability they should give all the writers unlimited ChatGPT and then ask them to write a better story. The problem isn't that they used AI, that's fine, it's that they used it badly and you're elevating lazy slop!

• @ednewtonrex Ed Newton-Rex on x

  People in AI like to claim AI doesn't compete with the authors of the work it is trained on, making training on people's work more likely to be fair use. If this short story prize went to an AI story - as seems likely - that position gets even harder to argue.

• @krishnanrohit Rohit on x

  The problems include - you can't just ask AI if something is AI. It's not reliable - how you ask significantly impacts how it answers AI is quite an unreliable narrator about itself. This is why specialised solutions like Pangram exist.

• @bobo_circus @bobo_circus on x

  Something kind of breathtaking about how the publishing industry has been so thoroughly bent to coddle dopes with MFAs and season passes to writing workshops that it's impossible to tell the difference between their writing and a robot trained on emails. Beautiful, in its way.

• @allgarbled Gabe on x

  Literary journals are now publishing, and awarding prizes to, AI written stories. Surprised this made it into Granta! [image]

• @nabeelqu Nabeel S. Qureshi on x

  Honestly hilarious that Granta's response to the whole affair is asking Claude whether the writing is AI, a method I would not consider reliable, given that: 1) LLMs tend to ‘both sides’ these types of questions 2) The way you frame the question to the LLM matters [image]

• @atabarrok Alex Tabarrok on x

  AI slop is good.

• @mushtaqbilalphd Mushtaq Bilal, PhD on x

  This should tell you the absolutely abject level of AI literacy among literary critics and publishers. Sigrid Rausing is the publisher of Granta, probably the most prestigious literary magazine in the English-speaking world. And Rausing holds a PhD in social anthropology from [im…

• @afinetheorem Kevin A. Bryan on x

  Quite interesting - a quite-obvious-to-anyone-who-uses- AI piece of writing won a Granta prize. I do think the ability to *identify* AI writing/images will go away very quickly, though: many ideas on how to avoid these patterns in training + personal memory/continual learning.

• @dioscuri Henry Shevlin on x

  We'll see if this turns out to be true, but equally interesting is why we care if literature is AI-generated. I suspect part of it comes back to consciousness. A lot of great art is about translating and conveying interiority, but if the inside is empty, the structure is hollow.

• @max_spero_ Max Spero on x

  @MushtaqBilalPhD No, most people are reading the essay and seeing an essay densely packed with common AI phrases and structures. Pangram doesn't catch all AI outputs, but it has a false positive rate of < 1 in 10,000. We don't say that something is AI unless we are sure of it (es…

• @drmtown Danny Wilf-Townsend on x

  My guess is that the epistemics here are: the editors and judges in the contest do not like AI, and so do not use AI and are not very informed as to (real) AI trends. And they are then more susceptible to failing to see that something they encounter was written by AI.

• @thestalwart Joe Weisenthal on x

  Between this and that “grief of adult friendship” piece that went viral, this has been a big week for AI generated writing breaking through in a big way.

• @justinnisly Justin Nisly on x

  The lesson Granta *should* learn is to dedicate time and labor to read submissions more closely. The lesson they *will* learn is to only publish writers someone there already knows personally.

• @yokaihainen @yokaihainen on x

  Contrary to the AI accusations, Jamir Nazir is a real human writer. We went to the Wyoming Writers Workshop together in 2015, after having both been dismissed from the Iowa Writers Workshop, I for having claimed for the 5th year in a row I was doing research for my novel on

• @la_leere @la_leere on x

  the first two paragraphs of this obviously AI-generated story contain the character name “Vishnu Muhammad” and a nominally trinidadian woman saying “the grove ain't forget”, on top of a few facially incoherent metaphors. racist judges going “well that's just postco lit” lol

• @thelincoln Lincoln Michel on x

  Always worried that if LLMs destroyed literature it wouldn't be because they surpassed human achievement or humans wanted to read LLM fiction, but because people would get tired tired of being constantly on guard for being duped and give up on bothering to read new work at all.

• @mcmansionhell Kate Wehwalt on x

  Why should the rest of us even bother lol

• @brunellaism Brunella on x

  one really amazing thing about this is that we will finally have to give up on the project of lowest common denominator magical realist diaspora literature

• @tszzl Roon on x

  @nabeelqu @GrantaMag not sure how to feel about this

• @amhcrane87 Addison Zeller on x

  Part of me feels that it's justice: a long-deserved reckoning for the overpowering dullness of fancy lit mags.

• @kjcharleswriter.com KJ Charles on bluesky

  so it appears that the Commonwealth Short Story Prizewinner for 2026 may have been AI generated.  —  You can read it here.  [embedded post]

• @vajra.me Vajra Chandrasekera on bluesky

  apparently Nazir has denied the slop charges.  “All shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used and, upon further consultation, the Foundation has confirmed this.” commonwealthfoundation.com/commonwealth ...  [embedded post]

• @kjcharleswriter.com KJ Charles on bluesky

  I mean, as Vajra Chandrasekera said, it doesn't half make you reflect on the nature of ‘literary’ writing if it's that easy to confuse with slop.  Like, there's a lot of AI romance out there, but it isn't winning accolades.

• @vajra.me Vajra Chandrasekera on bluesky

  oh lord I did not realize Granta put out a statement that literally says “We showed Claude the story and asked if it was AI and it said yeah but also maybe no.” See also very much this: bsky.app/profile/robe...  [embedded post]

• @john-self John Self on bluesky

  Why did no one spot that the author image for ‘Jamir Nazir’ is clearly AI-generated?  —  commonwealthfoundation.com/short- story-...  [image]

• @vajra.me Vajra Chandrasekera on bluesky

  I do agree that AI checkers are a bad idea but one wonders what, beyond the honour system, is even a reasonable measure of “confirmation”

• @vajra.me Vajra Chandrasekera on bluesky

  Whether Nazir's story is slop or merely bad (I lean slop, because his self-published books of poems from the pre-AI era don't suggest that this is his natural style) it's sort of hilarious that we talk about romantasy or whatever as rigidly formulaic without recognizing Granta-fi…

• @kirstenbakis.com Kirsten Bakis on bluesky

  I don't get this.  There's so much talks of em dashes and AI checkers and “maybe we'll never know if it's AI.”  98% of the issue is that it's it's terrible!  It's such a bad, weird imitation of good writing!  I do not get it.  —  www.theguardian.com/books/2026/ m...

• r/TrinidadandTobago r on reddit

  ‘Obvious markers of AI’: doubts raised over winner of short story prize

• r/RSbookclub r on reddit

  Commonwealth Short Story Prize awards AI-generated fiction

• Fran Mulhern Fran Mulhern on linkedin

  https://lnkd.in/...  Now I know why some people were very annoyed at Granta yesterday.  —  The sad fact is there's no way to know for sure. …

• @nickevershed @nickevershed on bluesky

  honestly we're probably at the stage where paid publication (in news, fiction, etc) should require authors to provide their working files with history of changes (eg track changes, google docs history, various timestamped files, photos of notebooks etc).  it won't  —  www.theguar…