This Literary AI Scandal Changes Everything

Not so long ago, authors whose work smacked of AI would own up to help from the bot. Not so now, according to Vauhini Vara, who covers the scandal clouding the Commonwealth Story Prize for The Atlantic. “The award came with 2,500 British pounds and publication on the website of Granta, a prestigious British literary magazine,” she writes. Three of the five regional winners have been accused of using AI to generate their stories in whole or in part. Vara reports that using AI to win a fiction prize is deeply troubling, of course, but the public responses from the prize itself and from Granta have been even more so.

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.