On Monday, social media buzzed that a short story written by artificial intelligence had “won the award.”prestigious literary award,” I chose not to blog about it. I hadn’t heard of the Unity Award, so how reputable was it really? Plus, there was nothing close to proof of what was being claimed — just some complaints and people trying to overstate their point. infallible AI detectors.
But the social media allegations have metastasized into a scandal by now, and if The New York Times is now writing about iti can be too.
If you’ve made it this far to a blog post about a short story, you might as well read the short story and form your own opinion. It is called “The Serpent in the Guard” and the author is Jamir Nazir. It is not paid and it is Available on the Granta website.
How did you feel when you read the sentence “Outside, little Putty—three years old, in the darkness of the sun, bright-eyed—chased the yard-bird through the dust, his laughter like water on pebbles”? I assume you made fun of it by adopting a lot of AI tropes. Even if you come to the story cold, you could feel them, but you still won’t. Let’s face it: if it weren’t for the scandal, you probably wouldn’t be reading a short story today.
But here’s a section that’s unlikely to be written by AI:
With his father on his shoulders and his mother firmly on his shoulders, Putti goes there when work tears him apart. Out of respect, it becomes a habit to stop short of the ring. He listens: the rustle of the leaves, the soft hiss of the sun, a creak that the tree has learned to behave like wood and is tired of pretending.
It’s too stylized and playful with grammar to be typical AI output. But what exactly does this mean for someone who thinks the AI model is writing the story? Does this disprove the notion of AI authorship? Does it simply mean that the human author embellished certain parts? Or you maybe Do you think you can get an AI model to write like that, especially if you feed it with samples?
Sigrid Rausing, publisher of Granta, a enigmatic, enigmatic expression Of the AI charges, he wrote, in part, “The judges may have now awarded an instance of AI plagiarism—we just don’t know yet, and maybe we never will.” But his statement also says he gave the story to Claude and zeroed in on the more human-like parts, saying they contained “specificity beyond form” and that AI could potentially be used to “work around” those parts.
But again, wow Who cares what Claude thinks about it?
CEO of the foundation that administers the Commonwealth Award, Razmi FaroukHe spoke to the New York Times and also kept things pretty vague, saying that his organization is “taking the comments into account” and “doing some internal soul-searching to see if we feel our process to date is robust enough.” While its foundation is “confident in the seriousness” of the AI vetting process, they note that it is an “evolving technological environment.”
There are now other stories on the Granta website accused of plagiarism by AI online, and Granta added a note to all Commonwealth Prize winners, saying in part:“The suggestion that the writers did not provide original material is an accusation we take seriously, but we will keep these stories on our site until clear evidence emerges.”
But despite some early accusations, Jamir Nazir looks like a real personbased on Trinidad and Tobago. If he used AI to write the story, the “prestige” prize paid more prestige than money. He received £2,500 for his trouble as he was the Caribbean regional prizewinner. The £5,000 all-around winner will not be announced until June 30.
From the intensity of online discussions, esp book subredditslooks like someone will eventually track down the Minister and force him to either confess or make a legal statement swearing he wrote it all himself.
In any case, it is doubtful that the people who are offended by this will get the acquittal they want. Even if the minister is guilty, he can simply deny it, or rather, in line with what people in this situation tend to do, he can take cues here and there from the LLM, but still claim to be the real author.
Meanwhile, people have a lot of strong opinions about the short story. If this is the truth, Nazir just writes as LLM, what a way to find out.
