Pangram Labs analysis flags AI-generated text in three 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize regional winners plus the 2025 overall winner and a Granta-published story

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Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).

"Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.

A major milestone for AI, at any rate...

@GrantaMag

Commonwealth Foundation Creatives@cwfcreatives

‘The Serpent in the Grove’ by Jamir Nazir is a story set in rural Trinidad about a struggling farmer, a silenced young wife and a grove that seems to remember what others try to bury.

Awarded the Caribbean regional winner title for its lyrical precision and haunting atmosphere, the story stood out for the confidence and restraint of its voice.

The story has been published on Granta: https://granta.com/the-serpent-in-the-grove/

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Daniel Friedman@DanFriedman81

In 2015, a white man resubmitted a poem that had been rejected by every literary magazine under a Chinese pen name and got it accepted into the “Best American Poetry” anthology.

In 2026, a ChatGPT short story submitted under the name Jamir Nazir — a Muslim from Trinidad — won the Commonwealth prize.

The lesson of both of these stories is that literary judges’ assessment of the same piece of writing changes based on who they believe wrote it.

Nobody would ever accidentally award a prize to ChatGPT if what their contest was seeking to elevate was strong writing, powerful storytelling or a strong, unique voice. AI produces none of this.

These judges awarded a prize to a ChatGPT story because they can’t look at a rambling, nonsensical piece of writing with no real plot, no real point, tons of cliches and lots of non-sequitur figurative language — all the hallmarks of AI writing — and tell it’s bad if they believe it was written by an exotic minority.

rohit@krishnanrohit

This is truly embarrassing. I know not everyone is equally proficient or understand how AI works, but seriously, "I asked AI if it was AI" is worse than if they just left it up and stayed out of it.

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roon@tszzl

on the granta story. it’s clearly written by gpt. you can see all the motifs it loves and overuses like rain, weather, teeth, spine, memory. extreme overuse of figurative language and contrastive negation. it has the level of over-baking of probably GPT-5-thinking or 5.2-thinking

the story is … something ? I don’t think it has no value. the model develops an indo-Caribbean world register, man tries to murder his wife and chickens out. there’s some reasonable religious imagery where he combining three mythologies there with the names and whatnot

all of that is obviously overshadowed by the GPT prose style, and it’s hard for your eyes to not glaze over. there are various metaphors in there that boggle the mind. stuff like “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink”.

what’s interesting is I went through the story and asked Claude Opus - a different model than the author model - and it seemed to find each and every one of the metaphors I hated brilliant. it finds a just so explanation for each of them when you press it

which makes you think, do these models have a shared internal vocabulary or compress various ideas in ways we don’t? the failures are quite interesting in that they reveal some different, and maybe bad, understanding of the human sensorium than a human has. why is pretraining knowledge compressed this way across all models? idk

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roon@tszzl

Claude can identify ai writing reasonably proficiently, so can GPT 5.5, and this is a recent phenomenon that wasn’t true even months ago

rohit@krishnanrohit

This is truly embarrassing. I know not everyone is equally proficient or understand how AI works, but seriously, "I asked AI if it was AI" is worse than if they just left it up and stayed out of it.

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rohit@krishnanrohit

This is truly embarrassing. I know not everyone is equally proficient or understand how AI works, but seriously, "I asked AI if it was AI" is worse than if they just left it up and stayed out of it.

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Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Anybody who has used GPT 4o for more than 5 minutes will recognize this voice:

Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).

"Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.

A major milestone for AI, at any rate...

@GrantaMag

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Pangram@pangram

Lol

qt cache🪷@frontier_foid

doesn't seem like an one off. of the 5 stories that won, 3 appear to be primarily ai written according to pangram.... 🙄🙄

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Ethan Mollick@emollick

Well, that's a Turing Test of a sort.

(But gosh is the AI writing obvious if you use these systems at all - and this is obviously ChatGPT writing, not Claude)

Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).

"Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.

A major milestone for AI, at any rate...

@GrantaMag

42d25.7K18238

Ed Newton-Rex@ednewtonrex

People in AI like to claim AI doesn’t compete with the authors of the work it is trained on, making training on people’s work more likely to be fair use.

If this short story prize went to an AI story - as seems likely - that position gets even harder to argue.

Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).

"Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.

A major milestone for AI, at any rate...

@GrantaMag

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Danny Wilf-Townsend@drmtown

My guess is that the epistemics here are: the editors and judges in the contest do not like AI, and so do not use AI and are not very informed as to (real) AI trends. And they are then more susceptible to failing to see that something they encounter was written by AI.

Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).

"Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.

A major milestone for AI, at any rate...

@GrantaMag

42d13.4K18930

Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Honestly hilarious that Granta's response to the whole affair is asking Claude whether the writing is AI, a method I would not consider reliable, given that: 1) LLMs tend to 'both sides' these types of questions 2) The way you frame the question to the LLM matters

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Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Pangram thinks so too:

gabe@allgarbled

Literary journals are now publishing, and awarding prizes to, AI written stories. Surprised this made it into Granta!

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james yu@jamesjyu

I ran the stories from the past three years of Granta's short story prize through Pangram.

Reminder: Author's Guild did a survey in 2023 (!!) that showed 25% of authors used AI in their process.

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y - Alex Clifton ⚔️🏒📚@AlbatrossAlex

My two favourite terrible sentences from this are “she had the kind of walking that made benches become men” and “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” Who read this and thought “wow, what a beautiful image”?????? WHAT IS SUNRISE OVER A SINK SUPPOSED TO BE

Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).

"Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.

A major milestone for AI, at any rate...

@GrantaMag

42d93.3K2.3K239

Hadas Weiss@weiss_hadas

everyone: we know

ai: it's 100% ai-generated

granta: perhaps we never will know

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roon@tszzl

confirms my prior that the “tells” of ai writing destroy almost all its aura to those familiar with it but underlying is at least plausible for those without the exposure to identify

Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelqu

Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).

"Not X, not Y, but Z" sentences everywhere, the "hums" trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.

A major milestone for AI, at any rate...

@GrantaMag

41d7.9K11717

Kevin A. Bryan@Afinetheorem

The Commonwealth Prize response to the AI-written story (and the fact that they still don't realize that there are at least 2 AI-written prize winning stories!) is a great example of the wide gaps in AI literacy across sectors. Now apply this to managerial decisions...

rohit@krishnanrohit

This is truly embarrassing. I know not everyone is equally proficient or understand how AI works, but seriously, "I asked AI if it was AI" is worse than if they just left it up and stayed out of it.

41d18.7K8518

𝕱𝖚𝖑𝖑 𝕶𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖞@full_kelly_

@tszzl I like this point by Scott Alexander / Nostalgebraist:

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Tuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakr

Lots of people complaining about nonsensical awkard metaphors in the @GrantaMag award winning stories

@rkdsaakyan @najoungkim @SmaraMuresanNLP and yours truly published a paper on exactly this :)

y - Alex Clifton ⚔️🏒📚@AlbatrossAlex

My two favourite terrible sentences from this are “she had the kind of walking that made benches become men” and “the girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” Who read this and thought “wow, what a beautiful image”?????? WHAT IS SUNRISE OVER A SINK SUPPOSED TO BE

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rohit@krishnanrohit

Extraordinary response. As a famous award winning short story writer would say, this is not just constructing the funeral pyre, but actively lighting the match.

rohit@krishnanrohit

The problems include - you can't just ask AI if something is AI. It's not reliable - how you ask significantly impacts how it answers

AI is quite an unreliable narrator about itself. This is why specialised solutions like Pangram exist.

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