The literary world isn't prepared for AI

A British literary magazine published a Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner whose story showed patterns associated with large language models, including mixed metaphors, anaphora, and lists of threes. Initial skepticism about AI authorship was tempered by the story’s distinctive prose qualities, such as em dashes, specific word choices, and short punchy sentences used to break up longer ones. The piece argues that human writing can also contain these features, since language models learn from human text. Despite that, the story’s overall feel raised doubts about whether it was produced with AI assistance. The broader claim is that multiple recent scandals point to systemic issues in publishing rather than to inherent flaws or strengths in LLM-generated writing.

"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. Jamir Nazir's "The Serpent in the Grove" has many of the hallmarks of LLM-generated prose - mixed metaphors, anaphora, lists of threes."

"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"

Read at The Verge