‘The telltale signs of AI’: doubts raised over short story prize winner | Books

A few syntactical tics – and a decision by an AI detection platform – have sparked outrage over the possibility that a short story awarded a top writing award was written by AI.

The foundation that awarded the award was Granta, the magazine that published the winners storyHe said he had thought about what had been said but he had not come to the conclusion that it was true.

“It may be that the jury will now award the prize for the AI ​​scam – we don’t know, and we probably never will,” Granta’s publisher, Sigrid Rausing, said.

The Serpent in the Grove was named the winner of the Commonwealth award from the Caribbean on Saturday and was published in Granta magazine.

In “restrained and calm commanding words”, according to the jury, it describes the difficult events in a troubled marriage, and is set in a farmhouse near a magical forest.

As soon as it was published, online gamers – with a few notes opponents – worked on the project with its author, Jamir Nazir, he says A 61-year-old man from Trinidad and Tobago has few publications to his credit.

Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he wrote on Bluesky: “100% artificial intelligence just won a Commonwealth award in the Caribbean,” calling it “a Turing test”. As evidence, he cited Pangram, an AI reviewer, which said the work was done by AI, but added: “Come on, if you know you know.”

Another commenter, earlier work at Palantir, said there are “many other well-known signs of AI” in the story, including let’s go of “not x, but y” sentence structure, here is a familiar trope.

Some experts searched what appeared to be Nazir’s LinkedIn historywhere they discuss things like the competition for AI tools and AI instead of jobs.

The claims are part of an ongoing, ongoing debate about whether artists and designers are abandoning AI-generated work as their own — and whether the media can catch them doing it.

The New York Times cutting ties and a freelance journalist in March after he admitted to using artificial intelligence to write a book review that appeared to be similar to one published in the Guardian.

Publisher Hachette has canceled the release of horror novel Shy Girl anxiety it was partially written by AI.

Articles like this have fueled debates about AI’s punctuation marks – words like “search”, the number of dashes, and “soft, fuzzy extras” such as “quietly powerful” and “deeply transformative”.

They have also made a strong business case for small AI companies such as Pangram, which claim to be able to separate machine prose from human experiments.

Pangram does well on controlled tests, but research on the power of AI analytics they predict there will be an “overwhelming competition for technological tools” between detectors, AI models and authors who are changing the way they are used.

The Commonwealth Foundation and Granta have said there are limits to their ability to determine whether Nazir’s AI claims are true.

The foundation said it did not use AI analytics in its judgment because providing them with unpublished works “would raise concerns about licensing and intellectual property”.

It added that all the awardees had sworn that their submissions were their own work and had “personally stated that no AI was used”, which was confirmed by “further discussion”. It added that the AI ​​testers were “infallible and infallible”.

The director general of the foundation, Razmi Farook, said: “Until a comprehensive tool or method of detection using AI emerges that can deal with the problems related to unpublished fiction, the foundation and the Commonwealth’s short prize must work on the principle of trust.”

Granta confirmed that it had no control over the winning articles but only published them as part of a partnership with the Commonwealth Foundation. It said it put a success story in the AI ​​tool Claude, which is consistent with how the project started, saying that it may not be pure AI but it may not be human either.

“However, there is an irony that beyond human search, AI itself is the most effective tool we have for revealing what AI is made of,” Rausing said. “Until the Commonwealth Foundation reaches a definitive conclusion, we will keep this news on our website.”

The Guardian approached Nazir for comment.