‘My writing process is unusual’, says prize-winning author accused of being AI

‘Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument. It beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan. The day the grove began to remember, the roof over Vishnu Mohammed’s shack groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat. Inside, air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa. A soot-blackened lamp hung from a nail. No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.”

Human or unhuman? The above is a paragraph from The Serpent in the Grove, one of the regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The story, by a writer called Jamir Nazir, is published on the website of the literary magazine Granta, which has long had a connection to the prize, though its editors have nothing to do with choosing the winner. Regional winners receive £2,500; the final winner gets £5,000. The prize has been up and running since 2012.

A few days ago, rumours began to swell online that Nazir’s story was AI-generated. There are – supposedly – AI “tells”, such as the rule of three, or even the use of the word “hum” that give away a text as non-human. When I entered a section of Nazir’s story into Pangram, the AI detection program that the Society of Authors views as most reliable, the results were (seemingly) clear: 100% AI. But remember, we are in mirror-world: the AI that detects the AI is trained on human writing, so, really, where are we? In the dark. The serpent in the grove indeed. Doubt has entered now, and doubt will not recede.

In a statement, Louise Doughty, chair of the judges and a fine writer, says this: “The rules are clear – writers have to vouch that they have not used AI, and if a story is proved to have been written that way, it will be excluded.” Well, that is not strictly speaking true, as far as I can tell. The rules as they stand now state: “Entries, including those in translation, must be made by the original author” and “the story must be the entrant’s own work”. What do we mean by “original”? What do we mean by “own”? “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” Bill Clinton said. Did you believe him? What counts as “sex”?

Razmi Farook, director general of the Commonwealth Foundation, told me: “We are reviewing our current processes and exploring ways in which we can understand the technology.” As she pointed out, the prize has an important role in supporting underserved communities and enabling new writers to find a voice. It is worth asking, she said, what kind of texts the AI detection tools train on. The answer is surely that the – stolen, let’s not forget that – work that has fed them comes from dominant cultures. But what would you do, I asked, if it were proved in a cast-iron way that a winning story was AI-generated? “Take stock, for sure. We would take stock and review our processes today,” she reiterated.

And what about Jamir Nazir? I reached out to him on LinkedIn, where he is listed as a business consultant in “organizational transformation and business expansion”. He told me he had been writing since childhood – his first poem was composed at the age of five, in a white and gold notebook his mother gave him. He had recently retired from work due to ill health. He told me that the true origin of the outcry was the jealousy of another writer. Later, by email, I asked him about his writing method, and this was his reply: “My writing process is unusual – it is conducted entirely on an Android phone. This is a necessity driven by chronic health conditions which make sustained, desk-bound typing physically impossible. That is why I rely on speech-to-text to do my writing, followed by minimal keyboard editing, along with the same process of speech-to-text. I have used this in my professional life and also to produce my story for the Commonwealth competition.” He says he wants to use the money from his win to support his writing: he’s bought a tablet, so he can use a bigger screen, and a microphone.

I ask for Nazir’s photograph. I run it through an AI checker. The machine tells me it is generated, or at least heavily edited. I am starting to hate myself. I didn’t get into this business to play detective, at least not in this way. Why wouldn’t you use all the tools available to you if it was hard for you to get a decent headshot done? His initial message to me on LinkedIn contained misspelled words, was ungrammatical. What light does that shed on his polished, prize-winning story? Any? Some? None?

What is a tool and what is “cheating”? How are we to begin to figure this out? Granta’s publisher, Sigrid Rausing, also reflects the mirror-world in the statement she released about the situation. How did they decide to think about this issue over at Granta, one of the English-speaking world’s most storied literary mags? “We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was AI-generated. The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’.” But what do you folks really think? “Perhaps we never will know.” We are back in the vicinity of Donald Rumsfeld’s extraordinarily prescient “unknown unknowns”.

What is most alarming to me is that in a sense, none of the details matters. What matters is that the genie of doubt – or the possibility to do harm by making accusations – has fully emerged from the bottle. Razmi Farook is right to be concerned that the ability of her non-profit organisation to do good may be hampered by aspiring writers’ fear of such accusations. I am fearful of them, and I am in an extremely privileged position. I am fearful too that the tech giants developing this stuff, and destroying the environment and stealing our work in the process, do not wish any of us well.

In the year of my birth, the French theorist Roland Barthes wrote of the death of the author; our earliest bards, the humans who first sang of Odysseus or Beowulf or Sir Gawain and his green knight, probably wouldn’t have understood the concept of individual “creativity”. For that matter, if you love Raymond Carver’s short stories, do recall that they were so heavily edited by Gordon Lish as to be nearly unrecognisable to the writer. It seems as if no matter what we do, for good or ill, we are all in this together.

Erica Wagner’s new novel Wash is published by Salt. Join Erica, an actual human person, at an Observer Book Club event on 4 June.