This week I feel we reached the peak “oh good grief, what now?” moment of the AI scandal hypercycle. And to be honest, I am genuinely not sure whether the whole thing feels more Woodward and Bernstein or Arthur Miller. In short, this week we saw serious shade cast on the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Jamir Nazir. Nazir's story, “The Serpent in the Grove,” was straightaway called out by several highly qualified people for being AI-generated.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
The Problem of AI Detection
But it's the reasons for this, and the response, that make this really newsworthy, because they illustrate an aspect of AI that is highlighted in so many surveys about concerns and which seems to be having an impact more than anything else: creating mistrust. The fact a reader will read something and be convinced it is human, another that it is artificially generated, and that the means of deciding between the two rests on the most uncertain of foundations.
In the case of “The Serpent in the Grove,” the text is apparently littered with so-called AI tells. I find it mildly troubling (apparently the kind of word pair that's such a tell) that these tells are ones I use so much (em dashes, for example). But what's clear now is that there are not only myriad (another tell) tools out there for spotting such things, but that amateur sleuths are using them. Pangram is cited in the Guardian's coverage of this story.
As a fan of running and cycling, this is not new to me. I am used to high-class investigative journalism uncovering doping programs. I'm also used to armchair sleuths casting aspersions in every direction. And I'm used to the chaos it causes, and the sense that you can never quite believe your eyes when something exciting happens. And that feels like what's happening here. I don't know about this case, but I am sure that we are witnessing both witch hunts and exposés right now, and we have no real way of knowing which is which.
Prize Organizers Respond
Which brings me to the reaction of the prize authority and the publishers of the winning story, Granta, to the assertions. The latter is a repetition of what I just said—that we can never really know. Meanwhile the prize authority has taken the only stance (at the time of writing) they probably can: stating that authors have to sign a declaration that they haven't used AI, and in the absence of definitive proof they are lying, we must take them at their word.
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