Doubts have been raised over whether a short story that won a prestigious Commonwealth literary prize was written by artificial intelligence, after readers spotted syntactical tics and an AI detection platform flagged the work.
The winning story, 'The Serpent in the Grove', was named the Caribbean regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize on Saturday and published in Granta magazine. The judging committee praised its 'voice of restraint and quiet authority', but shortly after publication, internet sleuths and literary critics questioned its authorship.
Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote on Bluesky that the story was '100% AI generated', citing the AI detector Pangram. Another commentator, formerly employed at Palantir, pointed to 'obvious markers of AI writing', including repeated 'not x, but y' sentence structures.
Granta's publisher, Sigrid Rausing, said: '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 and Granta said they had considered the allegations but had not reached a conclusion.
The foundation said all entrants had avowed their work was their own and 'personally stated that no AI was used'. Its director general, Razmi Farook, said: 'Until a sufficient tool or process to reliably detect the use of AI emerges … the foundation … must operate on the principle of trust.'
Granta said it put the story into the AI tool Claude, which equivocated, saying it was 'probably not pure AI but probably not an entirely human creation either'. The controversy adds to ongoing debates about AI-generated content in literature, following similar incidents involving The New York Times and publisher Hachette.
