This Literary AI Scandal Changes Everything

The scandal started the usual way. Readers noticed AI-like prose in a written work and took to ridiculing it online. Some ran the writing through an AI-detection platform that labeled it entirely AI-generated. The institutions involved in its publication scrambled to figure out what had happened.The details in this particular scandal have to do with an all-but-unknown Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir. His story “The Serpent in the Grove” was among five regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The award came with 2,500 British pounds and publication on the website of Granta, a prestigious British literary magazine. Earlier this week, readers started gleefully tearing Nazir’s work apart online, posting screenshots showing canned stylistic patterns and a proliferation of weird metaphors: “Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc,” read one line.“A major milestone for AI, at any rate,” one person deadpanned. Subsequent sleuthing only reinforced the early suspicions: The photo of Nazir on the prize website was almost too slick-looking; his LinkedIn page was filled with florid posts about AI’s potential to change the world.Before long, commenters were pointing fingers at two other winners of this year’s Commonwealth Prize: Malta’s John Edward DeMicoli and India’s Sharon Aruparayil. People posted screenshots from the same AI-detection platform; it flagged both stories as likely to have been generated using AI, DeMicoli’s in full and Aruparayil’s in part.DeMicoli’s online footprint was minimal before his win and the subsequent scandal. But Aruparayil works in communications and, like Nazir, has posted about AI—at times using language that only a chatbot would appreciate. “I envision a future where decision-making is a seamless synergy between human expertise and artificial intelligence,” reads a blog post published with her byline.[Read: How AI is creeping into The New York Times]I reached out to all three authors using contact information I