When a growing chorus of readers and critics accused Jamir Nazir, winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize, of using AI to write his winning entry, I did what any writer with a healthy amount of professional dread would do — I read it. Nazir’s work, “The Serpent in the Grove,” certainly bears many of the characteristics we’ve come to associate with AI writing. Bizarre metaphors and overly compressed language initially come across as bold, but a second read — and the strange language demands one — reveals the words for what they are: eye-catching tissue paper wrapped around an empty box.
The question of who wrote “The Serpent in the Grove” was one of several AI-generated writing controversies to emerge in May — a book reviewer for _The_ _New York Times_ and a Nobel Prize-winning novelist were at the centers of two others. Soon after the Commonwealth Foundation announced that Nazir’s story was a regional winner, a wave of response pieces followed, most arguing that AI writing was easy to spot and that anyone who relied on it would eventually face Nazir’s fate — even though the Commonwealth Foundation’s investigation concluded that he didn’t use AI, his name and any future work will always be attached to the accusations. > I entered an article I’d written months earlier into Pangram’s prompt box, pushing aside the irony of using AI to detect AI. Sure of my innocence, I clicked “check.” I mostly agreed that the story read like something AI would write.
But I also noticed that the voices accusing Nazir tended to belong to writers, a population with an obvious stake in believing, and insisting, that an AI could never do what they did. Those who want a more objective opinion point to AI detectors, tools that analyze text for patterns, structures, and other elements common in AI-generated writing. Pangram, the industry-leading detector, flagged Nazir’s text as 100% AI-generated.
Curious to see how these tools worked — and how accurate they are — I entered an article I’d written months earlier into Pangram’s prompt box, pushing aside the irony of using AI to detect AI. Sure of my innocence, I clicked “check.” But as the tool did its thing, a thready nervousness crept into my chest. What did I have to worry about?
A few milliseconds of unpleasant anticipation later, the screen loaded with a wash of green highlighter over my text. _Phew._ Then I read the score: 97% human-generated. My anxiety curdled into indignation. I flung my cursor down the screen, furiously scrolling through the piece in search of that 3%, as if the software could sense my outrage.
My closing paragraph, highlighted in pale yellow, with a note attached: “Light AI Assistance.” Rereading the paragraph in question, my steam began to cool off and settle into a pool of defeat and self-pity. I decidedly had _not_ relied on AI assistance, but I could see why Pangram flagged the text: I’d written a list of three and couched it in em dashes — two common AI “tells.” > The possibility that someone could automate my work hovered over every rejection like a professional dementor. The thing is, I really liked that article, and I particularly liked how that ending came to be — born from the kind of _human_ editorial process at the heart of most good writing.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
