Jun 3 • General discussion
When AI Wins a Literary Prize
Something happened last month that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, one of the most respected literary awards in the world, announced its regional winners. Then the accusations started. Three of the five winning stories were flagged by AI detection platforms as likely generated entirely by artificial intelligence.
One hundred percent of the text. Not assisted. Not inspired. Generated.
The writers denied it. Granta, the prestigious British magazine that published the stories, didn't pull them. They even asked an AI chatbot to determine whether the stories were written by a human. The chatbot said yes. The internet said otherwise.
Nobody was officially disqualified. Nobody confessed. And here we are.
I use AI. You probably know that. I use it to brainstorm, to cerate graphic and some video trailer for my stories (check my Substack). I don't think AI is the enemy of writers, I think laziness is.
We used to write on paper with ink, and then computers came along.
But there's something that troubles me deeply about this story. Not the scandal itself.
These were writers who entered a competition for human storytelling. Who accepted an award for human storytelling. Who let a magazine publish their work as human storytelling.
Whether AI wrote it or not, they know. And they said nothing.
Writing, for me, has always been an act of honesty. You sit down. You face yourself. You try to say something true. The moment you outsource that (not the craft, not the technique, but the truth) I'm not sure what's left.
What do you think? Where's the line for you? 👇
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When AI Wins a Literary Prize
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