The Surprising Lesson of the Granta Controversy

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.As clichés go, “Know your enemy” is a pretty good one—a little melodramatic, sure, but widely applicable. It could, for instance, come in handy for authors and editors worried about artificial intelligence damaging their profession. This week, at least three distinct controversies popped up regarding AI use in literature: The Nobel Prize–winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk said that she uses AI while developing her novels; a nonfiction book about AI titled The Future of Truth was found to contain muddled quotes generated by chatbots; and a prize-winning story published in Granta, an august British literary magazine, was widely accused of being machine-made. Writing about the Granta case for The Atlantic this week, Vauhini Vara suggested that the online sleuths who suspected that the short story came from a large language model might be “more discerning than prize committees,” in part because the former were more likely to use—and therefore understand—AI.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section: The book that plunges you into messy American history How Cuban history broke a family The perfect Gilded Age confection “Sonnet for the Tendered Garden,” a poem by Jill Bialosky Early this week, readers began pointing out common signs of AI writing in “The Serpent in the Grove,” which won a Commonwealth Short Story Prize and, with it, publication on Granta’s website. Its author, Jamir Nazir, has not publicly responded to the affair. But both the Commonwealth Foundation and Granta released noncommittal statements. Granta’s, in particular, evinced a shaky understanding of the tools used to detect AI. Its publisher, Sigrid Rausing, wrote that the magazine had fed Nazir’s story into the chatbot Claude—which said that it suspected AI use, although its assessment wasn’t easy to parse. (The story was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human,”