Allow me, briefly, to gather the evidence for the prosecution. Once LLMs became capable of churning out clean, comprehensible prose around the end of 2022, it was only a matter of time before people started submitting AI-generated stories to literary contests. And just had a “Snake in the Grove” by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir was announced as the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, than I and thousands of other people who visited the page dedicated to her in Grant website, began to wonder if the cars had scored their first win.
Exhibit A: the quiet hum. From the first sentence of the story, “They say the grove still hums at noon,” to the last, “And now, at noon, when the wind grows pleasant, the hum sounds less like hunger—and more like the earth clearing its throat to speak the names of those who returned,” there is hardly a sentence of “The Serpent in the Grove.” SOMETHING humming softly, or humming quietly, or sitting still in silence, or holding his breath quietly. As any hardened AI user will tell you, this obsession with stillness is an indication of what you get when you try to program an LLM to respond to keywords like “literary” with some kind of subtlety: a disastrous confusion of content with form, culminating in an endless, dull hum about how quiet and peaceful the whole scene is.
Exhibit B: strange patterns of denial and affirmation. By now, everyone knows that LLMs trot out the “It’s not X — it’s Y” formula endlessly, and Nazir’s story certainly isn’t spared in that department (“The log is not a register; it’s a mouth. It only closes when it’s pleased.”). But what is it? less It is well known that when you ask ChatGPT to write something “literary” or “sophisticated”, it tends to modify the structure a bit. New formulas creep in: “No X. No Y. Only Z,” and “No X, no, Y, no Z — only…” where X, Y, Z and everything are all living metaphors that don’t really make sense. Ingeniously, Nazir somehow manages to combine both of these techniques AND quiet hum: “No fan, no lamp, no hum—only the thin light that slips between the warped boards, and the breath of the hills that hold their heat like a secret.”
There were few candidates for Exhibit C. I was tempted to cite the fact that there are no real ones the characters in “The Serpent in the Grove,” or the fact that none of the endless resemblances tend to have anything to do with anything a human being can perceive (“She had the kind of walk that made benches become men”). This, I believe, underlies the total, brazen failure of irony that characterizes all LLM writing—and that The Serpent in the Grove almost paradigmatically exhibits. But in the end, I can’t help but go to the obvious: the fact that Jamir Nazir’s portrait, proudly APPEARANCE on the Commonwealth Prize’s Instagram page, it appears to have been created by AI as well.
Subscribe to the New Statesman for £1 a week
The Commonwealth Prize committee’s stance on the whole debacle remains rather defiant. “We take these allegations seriously and are committed to responding to them with care and transparency,” it read yesterday. STATEMENTbefore reiterating that “Our adjudication process is robust.” Sigrid Rausing, publisher of Grantshowed less confidence, first pointing outfair enough, that Grant He himself has no role in judging the awards and then making the curious claim that “we told Claude.ai the story and asked if it was created by AI”. According to Claude, while the story “almost certainly wasn’t produced without the help of a human being”, there are still some passages that “carry the kind of out-of-form specificity that models still struggle to produce without prompting”.
I doubt there is any truth to this. After all, many of the sentences in The Serpent in the Woods are simply too vague to be written by AI—which tends, for the most part, toward a kind of scrupulous grammatical correctness. Would ChatGPT write a sentence like “The galvanizing sun is a cruel instrument,” for example? Or “She looked at the mouth of the board and the random bent cut, as if it had legs”? Furthermore, there is growing evidence to suggest that even those parts of history that I DO display AI handwriting can actually be produced spontaneously by human beings. A 2024 paper from the Max Planck Institute, for example, found that since the advent of ChatGPT, gift words like “dig,” “laudable,” “punctilious” and “king” have exploded not only in published research but also in actual spoken conversations. There is a distinct possibility, in other words, that Jamir Nazir is just a jaded Don Quixote who has spent so much time on Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT that their weird, inhumane rhetoric has been drilled into his brain.
But how convincing is this a defense of Nazir, or the Commonwealth Award? Endless debate over who or what wrote The Serpent in the Grove surely misses the point. The real problem with the story isn’t that it Was generated with AI, but that it reads as if it had been created by AI; he shares the machine’s penchant for wooden rhetoric and the statistically improbable similes of the word “silence.” The fact that it won a competition – and was praised by judge Sharma Taylor as a “pulse with a voice of restraint and quiet authority” – suggests a shortcoming between the people. The UK literary establishment seems to have forgotten what makes good writing.
Indeed, the fact that LLMs are good enough to impress the kind of people who give out literary prizes is quite useful to the cultural critic, as it points to the very specific kinds of confusion that have characterized the world of books and publishing. Take, for example, the form-content distinction. Any user of LLMs knows that machines have a content-form problem: ask Claude to write something subtle and he writes five hundred words about how quietly everything is humming; ask ChatGPT to write something that can make you laugh, and it does responsible to produce a long, creepy story in which literally every character ends up being tickled. This is because LLMs have no way of distinguishing between what philosophers of language call different linguistic functions: asserting, warning, promising, commanding, persuading, seducing, are all flattened into a single optimization objective.
I suspect that many of the UK’s literary connoisseurs and gatekeepers were exhibiting just this kind of form-content confusion long before ChatGPT hummed its first quiet breath. In both non-fiction and fiction, books are increasingly sold and ordered based on what they are aroundas if the only thing that could make a book interesting was its subject. I know a writer who, upon handing in her carefully crafted drama set in France, was asked if she would consider writing a gay romance loosely based on the ice hockey TV show Rivalry heated up instead. I know some who have been told this, while the publishing house they were handed over to loves their manuscript, they just can’t find room for it because they’ve already done a book with a protagonist of the main character’s ethnicity or sexual orientation. In the shallow depths of genre fiction, I’m told, things are even worse: it’s not uncommon for readers to order what content they want from a menu of tropes—friends to love, enemies to love, love triangle redemptive arc, morally gray love interest, “there was only one bed.” Millions of copies can be sold, provided the writer obeys a single commandment: you shall not make it new.
It is ironic that many of the harshest voices calling for Jamir Nazir’s defense, not to mention, in some cases, GrantHis entire editorial seems to be reproducing the exact same patterns of confusion in a different key. One of the main lines of online censorship seems to be to feed “Snake in the Grove” into an online AI detector called Pangram, and then post the “100 percent AI generated” score that inevitably pops out. In other words, the most popular way to criticize Nazir for outsourcing his faculty of judgment to the machine seems to be to outsource his own judgment to the machine. Over time, one suspects, the stamp of approval provided by software like Pangram will become just the latest proxy used by the industry to determine the quality of a job without getting involved in complicated formalities. Already, the future is being handled by the crowd: a book industry arbitrarily protecting certain works on the basis of their artisanal, “human” origins; a generation of publishers with roughly the same relationship to works of art as the French Ministry of Agriculture has to certain types of cheese.
MOST writerof course, tend to be quite resilient to all this. After all, if you spend all day, every day moving bits of punctuation around in a word processing document, you tend to eventually become convinced that form, rhetoric, and syntax remain pretty important. However, the problem is that more and more literary prizes seem to be pulling their distinguished judges from OUTSIDE the profession of writer. The judging panels are becoming an endless cavalcade of TV personalities, influencers, amateur fans of every generation; After all, writers tend to be rigid, introverted, too, and literary prizes – which often operate on the slimmest of margins – often have no choice but to invite more established professions into the fold to attract publicity.
The good news, I think, is that if current trends really continue, the gap between the average writer’s command of form and rhetoric and that of the average person will soon be non-existent. Anyone will be able to have a literary career: you’ll just need to enter your demographic and educational credentials into the interface, go out and make a cup of tea, and by the time you’ve turned in your LLM of choice it will have produced a nice, clean product that you can hand off to your publisher. You might be able to make a living this way, provided you get the LLM to create an accompanying “No AI was used in the creation of…” guarantee to help market it. You will probably be shortlisted for some literary awards. But something will have been lost. One fine morning, you’ll wake up, open your laptop, and realize—with a quiet whoosh of horror, a hushed breath of silence—that you, too, have become a machine.
(Further reading: IT will destroy civilization as we know it)
Content from our partners
