The awarding of a prestigious Commonwealth short story prize has been thrown into doubt after readers and critics raised suspicions that the winning entry was generated by artificial intelligence. The story, titled The Serpent in the Grove, was named the Caribbean regional winner on Saturday and subsequently published by Granta magazine.
Online commentators, including academics and technology specialists, pointed to stylistic quirks and the results of an AI detection platform, Pangram, which judged the work to be machine-written. Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote on Bluesky that it was “100% AI generated story just won the Commonwealth prize for the Caribbean region”, describing the episode as “a Turing test of sorts”. Others noted repeated “not x, but y” sentence structures as an “obvious marker” of AI prose.
Granta’s publisher, Sigrid Rausing, acknowledged the uncertainty, saying: “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.” The Commonwealth Foundation, which administers the prize, and Granta both said they had considered the allegations but could not reach a definitive conclusion.
The author, identified as Jamir Nazir, a 61-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago with few prior publications, reportedly has a LinkedIn profile discussing AI-related topics. The foundation said it did not use AI checkers during judging, citing concerns about consent and artistic ownership of unpublished work. All entrants had “personally stated that no AI was used”, it said, adding that AI detectors were “not unfailing and infallible”.
The controversy mirrors recent incidents in publishing, including a freelance journalist dropped by the New York Times and a debut horror novel cancelled by Hachette over AI-related suspicions. Granta said it had tested the story with the AI tool Claude, which gave a mixed verdict, suggesting the work was “probably not pure AI but probably not an entirely human creation either”.
