By Gaby Del Valle
Publication Date: 2026-05-22 14:30:00
The British literary magazine since 2012 Granta has announced the regional winners of the annual Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This year, however, there was something wrong with one of the selections for the prestigious prize: it appeared to have been written by AI.
Jamir Nazir’s The Serpent in the Grove has many of the hallmarks of LLM-generated prose – mixed metaphors, anaphoras, lists of three. (I realize that this is also a list of three, and I promise that I wrote this post myself, without any outside help, since I write everything.) I admit that I was initially unconvinced by the claim that Nazir’s story was generated by AI. I know people use LLMs to help them write – or to write for them, period – but I was wary of the kind of AI paranoia that has developed among my colleagues. Em hyphens are supposedly an AI tell, as are the word “delve” and the lists above. Also short, expressive sentences, especially when used to punctuate a sequence of longer sentences…