Top Literary Magazine Offers Bizarre Response to Accusations That It Published an AI-Generated Short Story

A prestigious magazine published a Caribbean short story titled “The Serpent in the Grove” after it won the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize. Judges praised the work’s “precise yet richly evocative language,” attributing it to Jamir Nazir. Readers quickly raised concerns after an AI researcher identified suspicious signs and reported that an AI detector flagged the story as 100 percent AI-generated. Critics mocked the prose and pointed to common AI hallmarks such as negative parallelisms, lists of threes, turgid imagery, and figurative language that did not match the claimed precision. Several quoted sentences were described as vague, not coming into focus, and inconsistent with human-like clarity, aligning with how AI produces statistical approximations of language.

"Titled “The Serpent in the Grove,” the story was published Saturday by Granta on its website after being chosen as the winner of the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region. Judges praised the story, attributed to a writer identified as Jamir Nazir, for its “precise yet richly evocative language.” But readers immediately noticed suspicious things about its prose. Accusations rang out after Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at Wharton who researches AI's impact on education, called out the story as machine-written in a social media post."

"The AI detector Pangram, he found, flagged it as 100 percent AI-generated. (While the capabilities of some AI detectors are dubious, Pangram claims it has 99 percent accuracy with a vanishingly small false positive rate.) Of course, your eyeballs are probably sufficient for sussing out AI writing, and many on social media joined in to mock the story and decry the grim state of affairs its publication portends. All the AI hallmarks are there: negative parallelisms (“it's not X, it's Y”), lists of threes, turgid imagery, and nonsensical figurative language that seems a world apart from the precision the judges lauded it for."

"Explain this passage, for example: “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Or this: “Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology.” Or: “Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission.” And finally: “He saw all of it in a knife-second.” None of these quite add up. There's an approximation of a vague image in each of them, but they don't come into focus."

"Because if the story is indeed heavily written by an AI, that's literally what the tech does: provide a statistical approximation of human langu"

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