Granta short story prize pick is accused of being AI-written

In short: A short story published by Granta as part of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize selection is being accused of being written with AI.

What's going on

Granta, a British literary magazine, has published regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize since 2012. This year, one of the published selections has drawn suspicion from readers and writers.

The story is Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” which Granta posted as part of the prize coverage. According to reporting by The Verge, the story appears to include patterns people often associate with AI writing, such as mixed metaphors, repeated phrases, and tidy “lists of three.”

The Verge notes that these clues are not definitive. Large language models, or LLMs, are the type of AI often used for writing help, and they are trained on huge amounts of human text. That means they can copy normal writing habits, the same way a student might pick up a teacher’s style after reading it for years.

The bigger issue raised in the article is readiness. Publishing is still figuring out how to handle AI-assisted work, how to check it, and what to require from writers. It is a bit like trying to run a spelling bee after everyone has easy access to autocorrect, the rules and expectations need to be clear.

What to watch

More magazines and writing contests may add clearer disclosure rules, meaning writers may need to say whether they used AI tools at any stage. Publishers may also rely more on human editing and basic process checks, instead of trying to guess authorship from writing style alone.

Source: The Verge AI