Earlier this month, a short story titled The Serpent in the Grove won the Caribbean region section of the Commonwealth Prize, run by Granta magazine. Yet critics quickly accused the story, submitted by the Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir, of not being the work of human hands.
The story, they claimed, was full of the linguistic signatures of generative artificial intelligence. AI detection tools reportedly yielded the same verdict. (Personally, I don’t see it – but then, Nazir and I share a lot of the writerly tics such as em-dashes and semicolons that AI is fond of.) The fact that Nazir had published little else, and had discussed AI heavily online, didn’t help.
