Can AI Win Short-Story Prizes Now?

The Commonwealth Foundation announced regional winners for its Short Story Prize for unpublished short fiction, with an overall winner to be decided in June. The Caribbean winner, “The Serpent in the Grove” by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad, gained attention online because some readers believed it resembled AI-generated text rather than human writing. Suspicion centered on constant ersatz lyricism and a sense of inhumanity. The story, published on Granta’s site after selection, is set in rural Trinidad and follows Sita’s brush with death after she falls into a well. The prose uses heavy metaphor and simile, including striking but sometimes bizarre comparisons, along with negative parallelisms and anaphora.

"On May 16, the Commonwealth Foundation, an organization providing grants and other resources to Commonwealth nations, announced the regional winners of its Short Story Prize, awarded to works of unpublished short fiction; the overall winner will be decided in June. A few days later, the winning entry from the Caribbean, “The Serpent in the Grove,” by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad, was drawing attention online not for its “lyrical precision and haunting atmosphere,” as the prize committee put it, but because some people thought it, and other prize-winning stories, reads uncomfortably like AI-generated text."

"“It’s hard to explain exactly why, but it certainly feels AI, or at least inhuman, to anyone who reads it,” the writer Rory McCarthy told me when I asked what made him suspect its nonhuman authorship, pointing to its “constant ersatz kitchy ‘lyricism.’” The story, which was published on the British literary magazine Granta’s site after being selected, is set in rural Trinidad and involves a woman named Sita’s brush with death when she falls into a well at the edge of her property."

"It is crammed with metaphor and simile. “Shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesn’t rinse,” the narrator says when Sita’s philandering husband, Vishnu, waits for her in a medical clinic. Some descriptions are significantly less elegant, even bizarre: “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink”; “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.”"

"There are other hallmarks of AI writing, like negative parallelisms (“But the grove isn’t a ledger; it’s a mouth. It closes only when it’s satisfied”) and anaphora, or the repetition of words at the beginning of successive sentences"

Read at Vulture