Reviews of Commonwealth Short Story Prize archives since 2012 identify AI assistance in three of the five 2026 regional winners and the 2025 overall winner
Pangram Labs flagged repetitive phrasing patterns despite writer confirmations
#55Lucas Beyer (bl16)@GIFFMANANow this is a first: the literary author used a pseudonym!
@nabeelqu @GrantaMag not sure how to feel about this
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
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@nabeelquWell, 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
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
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@krishnanrohitThis 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.
@deepfates you should make an eval for it
🎭@deepfates@tszzl unfortunately it's hard to tell whether they have precision or accuracy
#133Boaz Barak@BOAZBARAKTCSFinally, GPT gets the recognition it deserves.
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
#175Ethan Mollick@EMOLLICKWell, 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@nabeelquWell, 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
100% AI on Pangram, which, although it has false negatives, seems to have very few false positives according to independent research https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5407424
Ethan Mollick@emollickWell, 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)
#228Andreas Kirsch 🇺🇦@BLACKHCThis is crazy. How did no one notice 🤯
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
@tszzl @nabeelqu @GrantaMag just another false win on the way to a real victory
roon@tszzl@nabeelqu @GrantaMag not sure how to feel about this
#517Andrew Curran@ANDREWCURRAN_Link to the story: https://granta.com/the-serpent-in-the-grove/
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
#517Andrew Curran@ANDREWCURRAN_
gabe@allgarbledLiterary journals are now publishing, and awarding prizes to, AI written stories. Surprised this made it into Granta!
#745xuan (ɕɥɛn / sh-yen)@XUANALOGUEThe part of the gradual disempowerment thesis I'm most skeptical of is the cultural disempowerment aspect -- it seems to me considerably less likely than economic and political disempowerment by AI -- but if stuff like this keeps happening I may have to change my mind.
rohit@krishnanrohitExtraordinary response. As a famous award winning short story writer would say, this is not just constructing the funeral pyre, but actively lighting the match.
#867Alexander Doria@DORIALEXANDERGuess it will be mostly a reveal moment how much people care about institutions (turns out, not much).
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
#867Alexander Doria@DORIALEXANDERNew development: Claude just told me he officially disagrees with this framing, not what s/he meant.
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquHonestly 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
#878🎭@DEEPFATES@tszzl unfortunately it's hard to tell whether they have precision or accuracy
roon@tszzlClaude can identify ai writing reasonably proficiently, so can GPT 5.5, and this is a recent phenomenon that wasn’t true even months ago
#878🎭@DEEPFATES@tszzl powerful comeback. could use this for a lot of things
roon@tszzl@deepfates you should make an eval for it
@tszzl Our eyes glaze over because we've read enough similar text that it is low perplexity and taste for us, but if it was truly the first such story it would be kinda good, maybe?
roon@tszzlon 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
#1050Tuhin Chakrabarty@TUHINCHAKRYes 100% by @pangramlabs. @GrantaMag has published some of the best writers of our times such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Franzen, Junot Díaz
We are living in hell !!
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
@nabeelqu @GrantaMag What struck me is how purple the whole story is. There is some personification/ metaphor at every 2 sentences. How on earth did this win a prize?
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
#1050Tuhin Chakrabarty@TUHINCHAKRIn the light of this , resharing @NewYorker article from Vauhini Vara :) I am not big on the inevitability train discourse for AI but as community we need to be careful about what we publish.
Ofcourse there can be value in AI generated fiction but without disclosure it feels fraudulent.
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
Tuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakrIn the light of this , resharing @NewYorker article from Vauhini Vara :) I am not big on the inevitability train discourse for AI but as community we need to be careful about what we publish. Ofcourse there can be value in AI generated fiction but without disclosure it feels fraudulent.
#1050Tuhin Chakrabarty@TUHINCHAKRLots 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 ⚔️🏒📚@AlbatrossAlexMy 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
nice to see creatives adopting AI
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
#1220rohit@KRISHNANROHITExtraordinary
gabe@allgarbledLiterary journals are now publishing, and awarding prizes to, AI written stories. Surprised this made it into Granta!
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.
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@krishnanrohitThe 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.
If the judges had any artistic merit or ability they should give all the writers unlimited ChatGPT and then ask them to write a better story.
The problem isn't that they used AI, that's fine, it's that they used it badly and you're elevating lazy slop!
rohit@krishnanrohitExtraordinary response. As a famous award winning short story writer would say, this is not just constructing the funeral pyre, but actively lighting the match.
#1220rohit@KRISHNANROHITJoe gets to the heart of the matter
#1281Jay Hack@MATHEMAGIC1ANI've heard pushback that AI will never be able to create art since the context of the artist, and their history, is a crucial part of understanding their work
IMO the artist's context is just a story you tell yourself and is probably largely fabricated in many scenarios
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
#1332Prakash@8TEAPI😂 the humanists hate AI so much they didn’t familiarize themselves with it enough to identify the enemy and are now unfortunately getting “mogged” (technical Gen Z term equivalent to milennial “pwned”)
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
@dioscuri There's also just the basic issue of cheating in a contest. It's obviously (implicitly) a contest for human-written stories, and somebody using GPT to pretend to have written one violates the rules, just as someone using Stockfish in a chess tournament does...
Henry Shevlin@dioscuriWe’ll see if this turns out to be true, but equally interesting is why we care if literature is AI-generated. I suspect part of it comes back to consciousness. A lot of great art is about translating and conveying interiority, but if the inside is empty, the structure is hollow.
@emollick Yeah, it's not even subtle.
I think a pernicious side effect of the literary world being so anti-AI is they're very vulnerable to attacks exactly like this. Most of the tech people I know would immediately clock the prose as GPT slop because they use it so much.
Ethan Mollick@emollickWell, 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)
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
To demonstrate, here are two screenshots from Claude about the 'paragraph about the acre', which the Granta response cites as sounding human.
In #1, the model confidently argues that it's 'likely human'. In #2, with modified prompt, it confidently argues the paragraph is AI.
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquHonestly 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
This sort of thing is obvious to people who have used Claude heavily and understand that models can be sycophantic, sensitive to framing effects, etc.
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquTo demonstrate, here are two screenshots from Claude about the 'paragraph about the acre', which the Granta response cites as sounding human. In #1, the model confidently argues that it's 'likely human'. In #2, with modified prompt, it confidently argues the paragraph is AI.
(response link: https://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rausing-Statement.pdf)
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquThis sort of thing is obvious to people who have used Claude heavily and understand that models can be sycophantic, sensitive to framing effects, etc.
#1397Nabeel S. Qureshi@NABEELQUWell, 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
Anybody who has used GPT 4o for more than 5 minutes will recognize this voice:
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
#1397Nabeel S. Qureshi@NABEELQUPangram thinks so too:
gabe@allgarbledLiterary journals are now publishing, and awarding prizes to, AI written stories. Surprised this made it into Granta!
@nabeelqu @GrantaMag Lmao @tszzl congratulations on your Nobel prize (soon)
Nabeel S. Qureshi@nabeelquWell, 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
#1447Ben Golub@BEN_GOLUBBig day for @pangramlabs
qt cache🪷@frontier_foiddoesn't seem like an one off. of the 5 stories that won, 3 appear to be primarily ai written according to pangram.... 🙄🙄
#1480gavin leech (Non-Reasoning)@GLEECHto preserve trust in our writers we have chosen to destroy the trust of our readers
rohit@krishnanrohitExtraordinary response. As a famous award winning short story writer would say, this is not just constructing the funeral pyre, but actively lighting the match.
#1480gavin leech (Non-Reasoning)@GLEECHGPT-Zero folks really did a number on the world
#1777Alex Imas@ALEXOLEGIMASThe whole thing is a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.
"AI use is strictly prohibited. We asked the writers who probably lied about using AI in their story if they used AI in their story, and they said they did not. We take them at their word."
rohit@krishnanrohitExtraordinary response. As a famous award winning short story writer would say, this is not just constructing the funeral pyre, but actively lighting the match.
