The Death of the Reader

Although I teach and edit fiction, I still didn’t think it would ever happen—that an AI-generated or AI-assisted short story would win a major contest. Then came Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” a regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, published on Granta magazine’s website. The story exhibits all the common AI-writing “tells” familiar to anyone who has ever scrolled through a restaurant’s Instagram feed. Em dashes, the word hums (in the first sentence), contrasts (“It’s not X, it’s Z”). No final verdict has been made about the story’s creation, and we may never know for sure whether Nazir relied on AI to write it. Yet the preoccupation with who the author might be—man? machine? cat?—distracts us from the real casualty of AI-written fiction: the reader.Soon after “The Serpent in the Grove” appeared, one Reddit user concluded that “AI-written or human-written, it’s painful to read.” I agree: The metaphors are nonsensical— “Laughter can cut a hush, not cure it”—and the narrative is hard to track. I followed along merrily as other Reddit users performed their own close readings. Suddenly, I was back in the college classroom, or a version of it, as words and phrases were parsed not only for evidence of a hoax but also to make judgments about their quality as literature.The conversation didn’t change my mind about the story’s literary value. But the public attention to the story’s style made me think about the tight relationship between a reader and a work of literature, and the ways that the advent of AI may damage that bond, if it hasn’t done so already.Reading is a solitary activity, not a lonely one. I was a shy kid who loved books in part because they felt like a form of friendship extended to me by the author. The phrase Dear reader, common to fiction for centuries, may be conventional, but it also suggests a relationship between author and reader that is intimate, warm, even affectionate. The literary critic Wayne Booth, in an essay on Geo