6h ago

Pangram.ai classifies Jamir Nazir's award-winning short story 'The Serpent in the Grove' as 100 percent AI-generated following its Caribbean win in the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize

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Pangram.ai flagged nine distinct segments as machine-generated.

Original post

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

8:21 AM · May 18, 2026 View on X
Reposted by

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. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
5:54 PM · May 18, 2026 · 25.7K Views

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 MollickEthan 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)

5:54 PM · May 18, 2026 · 25.7K Views
7:23 PM · May 18, 2026 · 4.9K Views

This is crazy. How did no one notice 🤯

Nabeel S. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
9:34 PM · May 18, 2026 · 534 Views

Link to the story: https://granta.com/the-serpent-in-the-grove/

Nabeel S. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
4:02 PM · May 18, 2026 · 4.3K Views
gabegabe@allgarbled

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

3:21 PM · May 18, 2026 · 107K Views
4:12 PM · May 18, 2026 · 1.8K Views

Guess it will be mostly a reveal moment how much people care about institutions (turns out, not much).

Nabeel S. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
5:17 PM · May 18, 2026 · 1.3K Views

Yes 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. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
4:13 PM · May 18, 2026 · 2.4K Views

@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. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
5:58 PM · May 18, 2026 · 2.7K Views

In 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. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
4:23 PM · May 18, 2026 · 785 Views
Tuhin ChakrabartyTuhin Chakrabarty@TuhinChakr

In 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.

4:23 PM · May 18, 2026 · 785 Views
4:23 PM · May 18, 2026 · 73 Views

Extraordinary

gabegabe@allgarbled

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

3:21 PM · May 18, 2026 · 107K Views
3:40 PM · May 18, 2026 · 9.5K Views

I'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. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
7:13 PM · May 18, 2026 · 740 Views

😂 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. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
4:41 PM · May 18, 2026 · 1.3K Views

@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 ShevlinHenry Shevlin@dioscuri

We’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.

7:46 PM · May 18, 2026 · 7.2K Views
7:55 PM · May 18, 2026 · 757 Views

@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 MollickEthan 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)

5:54 PM · May 18, 2026 · 25.7K Views
5:55 PM · May 18, 2026 · 1.6K Views

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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views

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

Nabeel S. QureshiNabeel 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

3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 507.7K Views
3:32 PM · May 18, 2026 · 17.7K Views

Pangram thinks so too:

gabegabe@allgarbled

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

3:21 PM · May 18, 2026 · 107K Views
3:33 PM · May 18, 2026 · 22.9K Views
Pangram.ai classifies Jamir Nazir's award-winning short story 'The Serpent in the Grove' as 100 percent AI-generated following its Caribbean win in the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize · Digg