/Tech23d ago

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

Literary foundation and Granta maintain the entries are human-written.

1.4K20.3K1.6K4.4K3.7M

#42

Original post

rohit#1210

gabe@allgarbled

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

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/

8:21 AM · May 18, 2026 · 184.9K Views

/Tech23d ago

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

Literary foundation and Granta maintain the entries are human-written.

1.4K20.3K1.6K4.4K3.7M

#42

Original post

rohit#1210

gabe@allgarbled

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

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/

8:21 AM · May 18, 2026 · 184.9K Views

Sentiment

Users slammed AI-generated stories for winning awards like the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and Granta entries, calling the prose awful and detection tools such as Claude queries inadequate or sloppy.

Pos

27.4%

Neg

72.6%

234 comments with sentiment.

Cluster Engagement

Posts from X

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VIEWS1.2MBOOKMARKS1.4KRETWEETS397REPLIES139

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/

23d1.2M2.8K1.4K

LIKES3.1K

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.

22d258.1K3.1K622

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

23d93.3K2.3K239

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

22d83.6K919233

naturgeschichtliche@la_leere

the first two paragraphs of this obviously AI-generated story contain the character name "Vishnu Muhammad" and a nominally trinidadian woman saying "the grove ain't forget", on top of a few facially incoherent metaphors. racist judges going "well that's just postco lit" lol

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/

23d149K1.3K161

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.

21d106.2K738154

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.... 🙄🙄

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

23d147.5K510152

AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️@AISafetyMemes

Not only are AIs suddenly solving the hardest math problems in history, they're winning fiction writing awards

"AIs can't write" is obvious cope, sorry.

The biggest tell of AI writing (besides a few overused ticks) is that it's TOO well-written, too articulate

Pangram@pangram

We tested every Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner since 2012. We found three more AI-generated stories -- two among the 2026 winners, as well as the 2025 overall winner.

20d179.9K461101

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.

22d208.1K35250

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

23d43.4K53027

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.... 🙄🙄

22d18.2K28628

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

23d25.7K18238

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

23d10.6K21625

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

23d13.4K18930

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

22d24.6K20922

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!

23d46.1K23428

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.

23d17.3K9642

Alex Imas@alexolegimas

The 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@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.

22d27.8K13323

Hadas Weiss@weiss_hadas

everyone: we know

ai: it's 100% ai-generated

granta: perhaps we never will know

22d3.6K2157

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

22d7.9K11717