The literary world isn’t prepared for AI

Since 2012, the British literary magazine Granta has published the regional winners of the annual Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This year, however, there was something off about one of the selections for the prestigious award: It appears to have been written by AI. The literary world isn’t prepared for AI Three recent scandals say more about the publishing industry than they do about the quality of LLM-generated writing. Three recent scandals say more about the publishing industry than they do about the quality of LLM-generated writing. Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” has many of the hallmarks of LLM-generated prose — mixed metaphors, anaphora, lists of threes. (I’m aware this, too, is a list of threes, and I promise I wrote this post myself, unassisted, as I write all things.) I’ll admit I was initially unconvinced by the allegation that Nazir’s story had been generated by AI. I know people are using LLMs to help them write — or to write for them, period — but I’ve been wary of the sort of AI paranoia that has developed among my peers. Em dashes are supposedly an AI tell, as are the word “delve” and the aforementioned lists. Short, punchy sentences, too, especially when used to punctuate a succession of longer sentences. But I, a human being, have certainly used all of the above in my writing before. LLMs, after all, are trained on human writing. They mirror what they’ve been fed. And yet there’s an eerie quality to AI-generated prose. There’s something off about it, even if you can’t immediately tell what it is. If there are specific AI tells, and I’m using those tells right now, then how do you know I actually wrote this? Nabeel S. Qureshi, a former visiting scholar of AI at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, was among the first to point out the suspected use of AI in Nazir’s story. For Qureshi, the first two sentences were proof enough. They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vibe, but a belly sound — as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there. “In general, AI writing has a particular rhythm that I’ve learned to pick up on which is hard to describe,” Qureshi told me via email. “There’s a spectrum from ‘AI helped me edit’ to ‘AI wrote this’ — this case reads to me like the latter end of that, though of course I don’t know for sure.” The problem is that even when AI use is widely suspected, none of us really know for sure. In a statement, Commonwealth Foundation director-general Razmi Farook said the organization is aware of allegations regarding AI in the prizewinning stories, including Nazir’s. Farook said all writers who submitted work for the prize are asked whether they’re sending in original, unpublished work, and that all shortlisted writers have personally stated no AI was used to help them draft their stories.…