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Vauhini Vara for Atlantic: "The scandal started the usual way. Readers noticed AI-like prose in a written work and took to ridiculing it online. Some ran the writing through an AI-detection platform that labeled it entirely AI-generated. The institutions involved in its publication scrambled to figure out what had happened.

The details in this particular scandal have to do with an all-but-unknown Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir. His story “The Serpent in the Grove” was among five regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The award came with 2,500 British pounds and publication on the website of Granta, a prestigious British literary magazine. Earlier this week, readers started gleefully tearing Nazir’s work apart online, posting screenshots showing canned stylistic patterns and a proliferation of weird metaphors: “Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc,” read one line.

“A major milestone for AI, at any rate,” one person deadpanned. Subsequent sleuthing only reinforced the early suspicions: The photo of Nazir on the prize website was almost too slick-looking; his LinkedIn page was filled with florid posts about AI’s potential to change the world.

Before long, commenters were pointing fingers at two other winners of this year’s Commonwealth Prize: Malta’s John Edward DeMicoli and India’s Sharon Aruparayil. People posted screenshots from the same AI-detection platform; it flagged both stories as likely to have been generated using AI, DeMicoli’s in full and Aruparayil’s in part.

DeMicoli’s online footprint was minimal before his win and the subsequent scandal. But Aruparayil works in communications and, like Nazir, has posted about AI—at times using language that only a chatbot would appreciate. “I envision a future where decision-making is a seamless synergy between human expertise and artificial intelligence,” reads a blog post published with her byline.

I reached out to all three authors using contact information I’d found online; only Aruparayil responded. She told me over email that she hadn’t used any AI tools at any point “in the writing, editing, or development process” for her prizewinning work. “The story has had only human hands and eyes on it, and I refuse to use AI in my writing,” Aruparayil said. She added that she had saved several time-stamped drafts, evidence of her active role in writing and editing the story, but she declined to share them. When I asked about her AI-promoting blog post, she said that she hadn’t written it. Rather, she said, an Emirati research foundation had attributed the post to her based on a project she’d done for it. The post has since been taken down. A deputy director at the foundation acknowledged removing it at Aruparayil’s request, but added, “To the best of our knowledge, Sharon prepared this work during her time with the Foundation.”

Much of the coverage of this latest scandal has focused on the possibility that two prestigious organizations unknowingly published AI-generated work. But that part shouldn’t be shocking. AI has also shown up in outlets including The New York Times and in books published by major houses. What’s different, this time, is what happened next.

In previous instances of suspected AI use, the authors quickly conceded that artificial intelligence had been involved. I wrote in March about a “Modern Love” column in the Times suspected of including AI material. Its author, Kate Gilgan, acknowledged to me that she’d turned to at least five AI products for “inspiration and guidance and correction”—in short, as a “collaborative editor.” Later, the Times introduced AI guidance banning freelancers from using AI in that way. Around the same time, the author of the horror novel Shy Girl—which readers called out for various AI tells after its U.K. publication—said that an editor she’d hired to help with an earlier, self-published version of the novel had used AI. Hachette, the novel’s publisher, discontinued the novel’s U.K. edition and canceled publication in the United States.

The current controversy is already playing out differently. Other than Aruparayil, none of the authors involved has spoken publicly this time. Razmi Farook, the director general of the Commonwealth Foundation, released a circumspect statement this week noting that “all shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used and, upon further consultation, the Foundation has confirmed this.”

Yesterday morning, Farook clarified in a call what this meant: The foundation had asked the winners to confirm again that they hadn’t used AI, and the writers had obliged. Farook said that the Commonwealth Foundation hadn’t used AI detectors, because they’re fallible and because doing so would involve inputting authors’ work into an AI product without their permission. Farook said that she believes the prizewinners’ promises: “We feel very responsible for making sure they’re cared for and protected,” she said. She also acknowledged a pragmatic dimension: “Our legal parameters don’t allow us to contest the honesty of our writers just because a tool says that.”

In response to an email query, Granta’s editor, Thomas Meaney, wrote to me, “I am aware of this and we have been looking into it.” Later, Granta released a statement that was difficult to parse. Its publisher, Sigrid Rausing, said that the staff had asked the AI chatbot Claude about Nazir’s piece and that the chatbot had concluded that the story was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.” (Talk about bad AI writing.) This seems to mean that Claude suspected that AI had been substantially used, though it added that the work contained a “human core.”

The statement only further fueled online ridicule. Claude is a general chatbot, not a tool designed for AI detection; if purpose-built AI detectors can make mistakes in flagging AI prose, Claude could be expected to perform even more poorly. At the end of her statement, Rausing declined to render a verdict: “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.”

Where does all this confusion come from? A couple of possibilities seem worth considering. One is that the readers, and the tools they use, might have simply gotten it wrong this time. A much-cited Stanford paper published three years ago found that AI detectors had a higher false-positive rate for text written by non-native-English writers than they did for text from native English authors. Because the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded to authors from all over the Commonwealth—an association of 56 countries—readers and AI detectors could be tripped up by language that is written by non-native-English authors or that deviates from American or British norms.

The Commonwealth Prize archives offer a useful data set for informally testing this theory. Since its launch, in 2012, the prize has been awarded to dozens of writers from all over the world. Pangram, the platform that detected AI material in the three prizewinners this year, is considered to be among the more accurate AI detectors. I asked Jenna Russell, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland at College Park and a research scientist at Pangram, to run stories from the past 15 years of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize through the platform.

She found that Pangram flagged almost none of the prizewinners. The exceptions included the three stories from this year: 100 percent of the text in Nazir’s and DeMecoli’s stories was flagged as likely to have been entirely AI-generated, along with 89 percent of the text in Aruparayil’s. There was also a fourth story from last year, by the Vincentian Canadian writer Chanel Sutherland, for which 88 percent of the text was flagged. (Sutherland didn’t respond to a request for comment sent through her website.)

Unless those results are fatally flawed, which is not impossible in this early phase of AI detection, they point to another possible explanation for the prizewinning authors’ categorical denials. Knowing that detection platforms are fallible—proving AI use isn’t as simple as proving, say, plagiarism from another author’s work—writers could be discovering an enforcement loophole. As Farook explained, revoking a prize without proof is, morally and legally, no simple matter.

I pointed out to Farook that prizewinning stories full of AI-like style—the em dashes, the bad metaphors, the details grouped in triads, the not-X-but-Y sentence constructions—are probably undesirable whether they’re proved to be AI-generated or not. She acknowledged that judges might benefit from training in identifying those stylistic quirks. She added that, as AI detectors improve, using them in the judging process could become possible—though only with informed consent from those who submit stories. Still, none of that would definitively root out AI. Farook said that the foundation has convened a panel to “review the risks” related to AI. In the meantime, organizations would set a bad precedent by responding rashly to even reasonable suspicions.

Lucky for us, then, that the reading public doesn’t share that predicament. People on social media are free to fling whatever accusations they feel like flinging. Some will be reckless; others could turn out to be more discerning than prize committees, whose members might have far less experience than the highly online in sorting the real from the slop."

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This Literary AI Scandal Changes Everything A magazine’s response to accusations of publishing AI-generated fiction points to a new phase in the struggle to keep literature human.

If you're a writer (or you know a writer) who's wrestling with dialogue, I discuss here some of techniques I use to strengthen mine. (Link in the comment section.)

The scandal divided the industry. Some accepted the accusation — and Hachette's response — as truth. Others felt the punishment was prejudicial, since AI-detection software like the kind used to evaluate Ballard's writing tends to be imperfect.

The incident, which Ballard says has ruined her career, demonstrates the conundrum that literary professionals face as they comb through every pitch, query letter and manuscript lobbed their way: How do you separate the proverbial wheat from the AI-generated chaff, and what happens if you get it wrong?

Link in comments

It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review Writer and author Alex Preston said he “made a serious mistake” after a reader spotted similarities between his review and one that appeared in the Guardian

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved” can feel like a kind of miracle. And Toni Morrison, therefore, like a kind of saint. But sanctification — our critics fear — has its own risks. It puts Morrison up in the sky, where we can’t quite reach her. They examine the depth of her masterful prose. https://nyti.ms/4u02LDC

How Toni Morrison Wrote Her Most Challenging Novel

Heather Cox Richardson sits in a small fishing village in Maine, far from the chaos of breaking headlines. While many of us scroll endlessly through the news, she transforms panic into perspective. A history professor at Boston College, her nightly work feels less like academia and more like medicine for the anxious soul.

Richardson devotes her studies to the moments when democracies collapsed and the moments when they endured. From this, she has uncovered something both haunting and hopeful. She asks us to imagine a family in America in 1859. Looking back now, the Civil War seems inevitable — the battles, the dates, the outcome already written. But for those living in that year, nothing was certain. They were ordinary people watching neighbors stop speaking, watching rhetoric grow heated, and hoping someone else would intervene. They saw the warning signs, yet step by step, they walked into the fire.

This is the burden of studying history: seeing exactly where the exit ramps were and how people missed them. Yet Richardson insists that the future is different. The past is locked, the ink is dry, but tomorrow remains unwritten. Unlike those in 1859, we are not stumbling in the dark. We know what happens when institutions weaken, when people are dehumanized, when societies edge toward the cliff. That knowledge — terrible and beautiful — is our power.

Democracy rarely dies in a single dramatic moment. Instead, it fades through countless small shrugs. It falters when good people decide politics is too exhausting, when they forget that the system is made of us. But history also offers the opposite lesson. The 19th Amendment was not granted out of generosity; women marched, starved, and fought for decades. The Civil Rights Movement did not succeed because victory was guaranteed; ordinary people, tired and afraid, chose to stand up anyway. Those triumphs seemed impossible at the time, yet they happened because people showed up.

Today, we stand at our own crossroads. The next chapter is blank — frighteningly blank. Each day is a choice: how we treat one another, whether we engage or withdraw, whether we let momentum carry us or take up the pen ourselves.

Richardson has spent her career studying the ghosts of the past, but she does not live among them. She lives in the hope of the present. The inevitability belongs only to yesterday. Tomorrow is still wet cement, waiting for our fingerprints.