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.