Commonwealth Prize winner cleared of AI use as detection tools face scrutiny over accuracy

Thoughts on AI, From a Prizewinning Writer Accused of Using AI

Jamir Nazir, the controversial winner of a prestigious literary award, tells his side of the story. Jamir Nazir has become the face of the AI-writing crisis. In May, the largely unknown 62-year-old Trinidadian writer was named a regional winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize for his short story "The Serpent in the Grove." But after it was published in the literary magazine Granta, signs began to emerge that the story -- about a cocoa farmer who cheated on his wife, and then tried to kill her -- may have been AI-generated. Among other indicators, Pangram, an imperfect but industry-leading AI detection tool, flagged the story's text as 100 percent artificial. Inscrutable lines plucked from Nazir's dense prose were mocked and memed. A young woman in the story "had the kind of walking that made benches become men." Another "smiled like sunrise over a sink." Soon, other winners' stories came under suspicion. The Commonwealth Foundation defended the authors, saying that all had testified that their work was original, but it pledged to investigate further. On Tuesday, the Commonwealth Foundation announced that "The Serpent in the Grove" had been chosen from among the regional winners as this year's overall prize winner. "The team worked hard to understand Jamir's creative process and learn how he shaped his story over time," a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Foundation told me in an email. Razmi Farook, the organization's director general, had previously issued a statement on the results of its probe: "After a thorough consultation with our judges and careful consideration of all available information, we are satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories." He noted that the investigation did not make use of Pangram or other AI-detection tools, because of their inability to provide conclusive evidence as well as "concerns regarding artistic ownership and consent." Instead, the foundation said it had held "detailed discussions" about the regional winners' creative process and examined "working drafts, time-stamped documents and notes" that showed how they developed their stories. In a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, Nazir told me he feels vindicated -- and relieved. "Look, I didn't use it!" he said about AI. Now that he has won the prize, Nazir said, he is free at last to explain his process and clear his name. We talked for more than an hour about his writing process, his health (he referenced complications with both diabetes and cancer), and his views on technology. On several occasions, he seemed to avoid answering my questions directly; when he did, some of the answers were circuitous. I was surprised to hear him opine that AI-generated writing will soon be widely accepted in literature, even as he maintained that he didn't use AI tools in creating his story. He seemed bullish on AI overall, viewing it as a revolutionary technology, though he worried about the repercussions of saying so. Although he couldn't name any works by Derek Walcott, a writer he cited as one of his main literary inspirations, he said he had prepared a collection of short stories in Walcott's style, which he hopes to publish soon. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Will Oremus: How did it feel to win this award after all of the controversy you've endured since you were named a finalist? Jamir Nazir: Yes, there's been a lot of controversy preceding this win, and it's been really hard. To hear people smearing me, and reading all of the crap. They didn't know there was a real human and a real family behind the story. One of my most joyful moments in receiving the news that I won the award was sharing it with my mother, who will be 82 in August. My nephews have kept her informed on lots of the negative things. I didn't take a sword and plunge it into her side, but I felt as though I supplied the sword by entering the competition. So it made me feel so good when I could tell her that I had won despite all the nonsense that they were seeing. Oremus: I know you've said you didn't use AI while writing this story. But I'm interested to hear more about your writing process. People were curious how you produced this work that was so dense that it almost reads more like poetry than prose. Nazir: I was born with diabetes. And as a result of that, conventional typing on a keyboard -- it's extremely difficult for me. As I've gotten older, the neuropathy has gotten worse. Sitting for long periods of time at a desk gives me some back problems. So what happened is I decided: Look -- no better place to write than the couch. And as a result of that, I found out that I can use the speech-to-text function of the Google keyboard on my Android phone ...That's what's actually producing words, and then I edit them and so on. That has given me the opportunity to significantly polish text. Because you know, on an Android phone, when the keyboard comes up, you only have a very small space, about three and a half inches, to see the writing. So I would look at those lines, and hold those words in my mind, and keep reviewing them, keep polishing. But to back up a bit: Why the hell -- sorry for the expression -- would I need AI? It was absolutely not needed in this story, because I lived this. The story actually has a lot of real people, real places, and real situations. Even the little bread shop I wrote about in the story actually exists -- not in my small, little village here now, but where my wife came from, which is another small village. Oremus: You've explained why you think the AI-writing detectors might have mistakenly flagged your story. How did you convince the Commonwealth committee that you didn't use AI after all? Nazir: They requested a lot of documentation. They made it clear it was voluntary to produce these materials, because they were not part of the initial rules. But I had to produce all of the previous drafts, and also my character profiles I had sketched out. And of course, I originally had to sign saying that no AI was used. Oremus: You've talked about how the unusual writing style in "The Serpent in the Grove" stemmed from your love of poetry. Who are a couple of your favorite poets who have inspired you? Nazir: The first one whose poetry I fell in love with was a guy known as Pablo Neruda from Chile. And his teacher or mentor was a lady known as Gabriela Mistral. Both of them had a profound impact on me. Then there is Derek Walcott, a Caribbean poet who, like Pablo Neruda, is a Nobel Prize winner. The thing that got me attracted to Walcott was his complete disregard for the traditional Western sentence structure, which people cite as one of the things that proves my writing was AI. But Walcott created his own style. I looked at how they all write, and I write poetry in their style too. AI must have been fed all their work. And another thing to that: I have significant poems that I've posted in several poetry groups on Facebook. Once it's on Facebook, AI companies will have data-mined that, right? So they have all of that as a reflection of my style as well, right? I wonder if they can attempt to claim it as their own, as AI-generated. Do you think that's possible? Oremus: So you mean that AI gets trained on human writing, and then it generates similar writing? Nazir: Okay, say AI has been trained with the writing of Will. So it understands what Will does, right? Now, when it sees Will's writing again -- if somebody puts Will's article through an AI detector -- because it's familiar with that style and construct, it tells itself, This must be generated by an AI system. I'm wondering if it is possible. Oremus: I don't know. That's not how a tool like Pangram works. It's looking for statistical patterns in the language that are more commonly produced by AI systems than by human writers. Nazir: But is that true? Why, then, has no court of law in any country, even the tiniest country in the world, accepted as admissible any AI-detector system? Not one country. So that shows you, in terms of the reliability -- I'm not saying it's not helpful, but I think there's still a lot of refining. Oremus: You had mentioned some of your inspirations earlier, including Walcott and Neruda. What's your favorite Walcott work? Nazir: Walcott has a lot of Caribbean poems, right? And I cannot -- there are several, and they talk about the destruction of a village because of the sea. And I wrote something like that. It's quite a change. And I am advertising a little bit, but I have a collection that I have written, my Caribbean collection, sort of Walcott-style. I tried to edit it as much myself as I could, and it's ready for publication. So hopefully this award will give me the platform to publish this. Oremus: But do you have a favorite of Walcott's poems? Nazir: A story of Walcott's? Oremus: Yeah. Nazir: To be honest with you, I can't think of a specific favorite right now. I am getting a little bit of brain fog in recall. I had an excellent memory, and now it haunts me because at times I can't remember even basic stuff. I think it's a part of the condition, the illness. And I'm on chemotherapy as well. So that is a hard thing. Oremus: Some of your posts on LinkedIn, as people have pointed out, are a very different style from your fiction. Which, of course, makes sense, right? I mean, fiction is a completely different mode of writing. But I wondered if maybe you used AI on the LinkedIn posts. Nazir: No, no, no. I did research with AI. But in terms of the actual writing -- I had grown accustomed to very technical and precise writing. I think that AI is a good tool for research -- that's the most value. And on the same topic of that, what about the typewriter? When the typewriter was first invented, writers kicked hell and said, The thing is writing. You're supposed to use a quill or your fountain pen. And there was a big hullabaloo. We passed that, and then next came new word processors. I can tell you word processors are machine assistants, because they can check the spelling, right? They can search, find and replace, suggest synonyms, et cetera. Modern-day word processing can do almost everything. Where's the uproar? It settled down. Now I think the same thing will happen with AI. Oremus: Because you think that eventually AI will be accepted as just another tool for writers the way that a word processor is, what is so bad about using it? Why not use it? Nazir: No, I'm not saying it's bad. But because of this current time, where the debate is on, like it was on for the typewriter or the word processor, I wouldn't encourage any writers in any kind of literary competition to utilize it now for fear of people criticizing them. Look -- I didn't use it! It's not only me, Will. It's also all these people who are painted with this AI brush, right? So I imagine you should stay away from it for any literary competition for the next two or three years. I think that discussions will be held and so on, and then people will get an opportunity to vent. I don't know if I'm walking on dangerous ground here with you, because as I was told a lot by the wife and other people, Do not show any appreciation for AI. I see it as being a tool incorporated in the future. Because a lot of people use it -- a lot of people.

Could the next great novel be written by AI (and would you even be able to tell)?

As allegations of LLM use rock the literary and media worlds, linguists explain what really distinguishes human and machine language, while novelists including Jennifer Egan and Jeanette Winterson reflect on the future of fiction in an age of ChatGPT Three paragraphs, from three different hotel reviews. Can you tell which, if any, were AI‑generated? "The hotel is in a great location for everything. Lots of places to eat and drink. The hotel itself is always abuzz. The tavern located on the ground floor is definitely a must. Food, service, prices and atmosphere were great." "A good hotel, though the room had the proportions of a well-appointed lift. Slept well, shower was excellent, staff were friendly. Breakfast was busy but competent. Would return, though probably not with a very large suitcase." "Excellent base for a London trip. The room was quiet, the bed comfortable, and everything worked exactly as it should. Staff were helpful without hovering. A smooth, unfussy stay from start to finish." How do you reckon you did? Most people, says Claire Hardaker, a professor of forensic linguistics at the University of Lancaster, get this kind of judgment right only about 60% of the time. Her online test, Bot or Not, asks users to identify the fakes in a series of 15 reviews. The middling success rate might come as a surprise to those convinced they can spot AI writing at 50 paces. When doubts were raised in May about the authenticity of a prizewinning short story by Jamir Nazir, social media users were lightning-quick in their condemnation. "If you know, you know," commented one. Hardaker says her respondents tend to rely on a few quick rules of thumb to identify AI language, including the presence of cliches and the use of dashes. The "rule of three", where words or phrases are arranged in a satisfying trio, is also thought to be a giveaway. "People have learned very simplistic rubrics and now just madly apply them everywhere." There's a problem, though: these "tells" are also characteristic of human writing, which, after all, the large language models (LLMs) that produce them were trained on. "You could go back to Charles Dickens and say he had AI, because he used the em dash too." And orators have known about the rule of three ever since Julius Caesar said Veni, vidi, vici. In our hotel review examples, only the first one was authentic. Did you clock it? Perhaps because it is so hard to know for sure, suspicion has become the order of the day. In the literary world, accusations of AI use now bedevil writers, with varying levels of justification. A debut horror novel, Shy Girl, was withdrawn by publishers Hachette after rumours circulated online that the author had relied on AI, which she denies; Steven Rosenbaum's book The Future of Truth, a serious study of "how AI reshapes reality", was found to contain numerous hallucinated quotations, which the author acknowledged in an apology. Media organisations, including the Guardian, field increasing numbers of complaints about supposedly AI-generated text. These include intuitions about particular turns of phrase, but also comments about typos and grammatical errors. In one case, the word "after" was inadvertently duplicated in a sentence. "I can't imagine a human editor/proofreader missing something like this," wrote one reader, displaying a touching faith in our copy-editing abilities. The problem is that not only does AI train on human writing, but humans are stylistically influenced by AI, the interplay creating a kind of linguistic hall of mirrors. Short of an author admitting it, it's hard to say for certain whether an individual piece of writing is AI or not. That uncertainty is a recipe for paranoia. And if you're tempted to reach for a commercial screening tool to sort human from machine, that comes with uncertainty too, says Hardaker. "Given that some of us naturally write in a way that would be seen as AI-like" - she mentions neurodivergent people, for example - "that will be detected as AI. And you can modify AI output to make it seem more human-like. You put that kind of content into an AI detector, you're going to get wacky results." As someone who has served as an expert witness in court, she's "extremely sceptical" about their efficacy. The newly popular detector Pangram, which boasts false positive rates of around 1 in 10,000, has been shown in independent tests to be highly effective at detecting AI writing even when it's been run through a "humanizer" app to disguise its origin. But questions remain. I was able to fool it on the first attempt (see the screenshot below) by channelling a bombastic register that might well be characteristic of AI, but could equally be the work of someone with a naturally bombastic style - or, more to the point, a writer who has been steeped in the output of the LLMs that power ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. That, increasingly, is all of us. Vast amounts of AI writing are now being published every day - from advertising copy to academic abstracts and fiction. At the same time, it looms ever larger over our lives via auto-generated email suggestions, "AI overview" search results, and the responses to our chatbot queries. At this level of exposure, it's no longer a question of whether AI is changing language, both the way we speak and the way we write; the question is how. And should we resist, or embrace it? We've known for some time that LLMs generate text that can be slightly different from human writing, on average. Often this only becomes clear when you look at large amounts of material. One eagle-eyed researcher linked the sudden popularity of the word "delve" to LLMs back in 2024 after searching a database of scientific papers. Other "focal words" that AIs have tended to overuse include "showcase", "boast", "underscore", "garner", "align", "surpass" and "intricate". But, again, any individual piece of writing could entirely innocently make use of this vocabulary. In a further twist, some researchers think the "delve" phenomenon might not be down to the models themselves, but the humans tasked with evaluating and steering them in a process known as "reinforcement learning with human feedback". For workers who are "underpaid, stressed, and under time pressure", it seems "certain words are treated as a proxy for quality" and the model is inadvertently trained to use them more often. In other words, "delve" might owe its meteoric rise to the fact it doesn't seem like the kind of word an AI would use. (A separate suggestion that it appeared more often because it was characteristic of English used in Nigeria, where many RLHF workers lived, isn't borne out by the data.) There are other patterns we can distinguish: LLMs love nouns, but they seem to use pronouns less than humans. This might reflect the fact they don't do as much talking about themselves or other people as we social creatures do. They like attributive adjectives ("the uncomfortable chair"), but not predicative ones ("the chair was uncomfortable"), perhaps because they prefer to deliver information in small, dense packages, whereas we pad things out. Different models have clear idiosyncrasies - you might even call them "dialects": Gemini enjoys saying "here's a breakdown", while Deepseek often responds with a cheerful "Certainly!". When asked to edit formal English from around the world, AI tends to flatten and homogenise towards an Anglo-American standard, in a process researchers have termed "cultural ghosting". Thus the perfectly acceptable request in Indian professional English to "Kindly do the needful & revert back at the earliest" gets "corrected" to "Please complete the task & respond promptly." The evidence that aspects of LLM-speak have escaped into the "real" world, changing the way humans use language when AIs aren't around, is now rolling in. One study analysed thousands of unscripted conversations and found that words like "delve" and "boast" spiked after ChatGPT was released. Another showed the frequency of "delve" in academic abstracts actually dropping after it was singled out on social media, in a sign that AI's influence might play out in complex ways. Does any of this matter? Language changes all the time - words come in and out of fashion, and new technology has always been one of the forces behind this. AI does seem to be generating particularly high levels of anxiety, though. Why? "I think where it scares people is that idea of encroaching into sentience, of becoming the new human," Hardaker says. Since 2023, she's expanded the Bot or Not project into speech and music, and has noticed just how viscerally people react when a song they've enjoyed turns out to have been composed and performed by a machine. Gary Shteyngart, a novelist who teaches creative writing at Columbia University, noticed a similar strength of feeling among his students at the prospect of AI literature. "When one of my graduate students said 'as an experiment, I'm going to be writing a part of this piece with AI', the other students became so angry, they wrote letters to me saying how awful this was." "There's a kind of implicit bargain between writer and reader where you know the work that you're getting is generated by a human being, and I think it felt like an assault on that," he says. "Reading literary fiction is this incredible Vulcan mind meld with another human being, entering someone else's consciousness. With AI I'm entering the simulacrum of another person's consciousness, one degree removed, or many degrees removed. How sad is that by comparison?" For Hardaker, "I guess it impinges on what we think of as what makes us special, what makes us valuable and unique". At the same time, the music-generation model she uses "has generated some absolute bangers. I listen to them, unironically, in my car, and I enjoy them quite a lot." Could the same happen with literature? Will a machine-authored novel one day take its place among the 100 greatest of all time? Peter Stockwell, professor of literary linguistics at the University of Nottingham, thinks AI may be able to do the basics, but it can't scale the heights. "If you want something that's very familiar and very mediocre and entirely functional, it's amazingly good at that." One way to think of language, he says, is as a series of layers, with words at the bottom followed by phrases, clauses, compound sentences, all the way up to narrative structure. "AI is really good at the lower levels. It's learned lots of our syntactic structures and so everything looks well formed and grammatical. But, the higher up you go, the less good it is." The arc of a story is particularly hard for AI to get convincingly right. "If you've got an AI to write a narrative, it can do a pretty good job of having a sequence of events and something happen at the end. But it wouldn't be a very tellable narrative," he continues. "Nothing startling or interesting would happen. And if there is anything startling, it will generally look like a mistake, rather than a brilliant twist." The secret sauce of great writing remains secret - even to the academics who study it. "Linguists don't understand, really, how language works at its higher levels," at the level of discourse, storytelling, enchantment. "We can't build a machine to do something when we don't know how it works." We do have some idea of what it might boil down to - and that's our fundamentally social natures and, tied in with that, the fact that we are "wetware" - human flesh, with its spikes of adrenaline, rushes of dopamine, craving for social contact, all of which find expression in language's structure and the way we use it. There are two broad models in linguistics, explains Stockwell, one that sees the brain as a computer, parsing grammatical structures and computing meaning from them, and the other that sees it as fundamentally embodied, something reflected in language by the fact that, in many languages, we understand by "seeing" or tend to think of "up", where our head is, as good (we get "high" and feel "low"). "One of the key things is that the current AIs don't have a body, they don't exist in the world, so they don't know what it feels like to be in the world as a human." For Shteyngart, feeling is essential: "Today is the first warm day in New York. And if I was to start writing a novel, I think that [it] would be warmer. I think I would filter what I know through the warmth of the day. I think if I ate a really wonderful lunch and sat down to write, there would be more sensuousness in my writing." "The love of the body and its encounters with the physical world are what drives some of the best of literature. So I almost feel sorry for these LLMs, as I'm talking about them, because they're pushed into some horrible machine in the Bay Area, and they just don't know how wonderful life is." One much feared effect of the mass use of LLMs is that they act as a flattening force - smoothing away the variety and idiosyncrasy of human language into a kind of beige goo. That's a legitimate concern, as far as it goes, though it's not a new one. People have long angsted about the homogenising effects of American film and television on accent and vocabulary, and there are subgenres of language - political euphemism, customer-service prattle, therapy-speak - that have spread further from their home territory than many might like. The crucial thing, though, is that their influence tends to generate a backlash - and there's no reason to think things will be different this time. In fact, our capacity for innovation might ultimately be the thing that truly distinguishes human writing - particularly the literary kind - from AI. "The whole point of an LLM is that it's trained on existing language. So it's always retro," says Stockwell. "I could get an AI and say 'write me a short story in the style of Virginia Woolf' and it'll do a decent job. But what you can't say is 'write me a story in the unique style of the next great, serious literary innovator'. It couldn't possibly do that." That's because, once again, it lacks the social environment, and the body, that give rise to characteristically human motivations. "Why does somebody do something new in an art form like literary writing? It can be out of annoyance or irritation with what's gone before. Or it's because somebody sees things in a different way than the run of the mill, or sometimes just because people are antsy and wanting to do something different, or a little bit crazy or isolated." The are plenty of examples from history, says Stockwell: "After the bureaucracy and uniformity of the first world war, you've got this sudden, huge, antithetical artistic movement in the rise of surrealism and Dada; similarly, after the austerity of the second world war you get the psychedelic movement, art and literature changes again, quite radically. So there always seems to be that sort of kicking against the norms. It's hard to think how you would program an AI to do that, because AI works on an existing large body of material. It's the embodiment of the conservative-with-a-small-c status quo." Originality is so important for novelist Jennifer Egan that she's quarantined herself from the technology entirely. "I feel a danger of infection, to use a kind of loaded metaphor," she tells me. "I know they stole some [of my] stuff, and there's nothing I can do about that, but I'm not giving them one more word voluntarily." Anthropic used pirated copies of books, including Egan's novels, to train its chatbot Claude; most LLMs use language from individual queries as additional training data. She sounds exasperated: "I don't want to partake of this kind of language spam that they're offering." The zero-tolerance policy doesn't stop her from becoming paranoid. "I've been told a couple of stylistic things that are tells of AI, and they happen to be things I like. For example, I love em dashes, but I now find myself interrogating every one way more than I used to. I've also noticed that I'm prone to collections of three. So I find myself interrogating those as well. I don't mind that, actually, because the entire point is to not write something that anyone else could have." What kind of advice would she give a younger writer now swimming in this water? Should they practice their own kind of AI hygiene? "I'm gonna now sound like the totally generic boomer that AI could probably have written, and my advice is: stay the fuck away. I mean, OK, use it to write emails. Even use it to get research ideas. But if you want to be a writer: learn to write. Come on. I would really question why the impulse would be there to use it." Not everyone is so abstemious. Jeannette Winterson, who has written extensively about AI and art, tells me: "Every writer can make their own choice. Humans are tool-using animals. That has been our success story. At present all AI, including generative AI, is a tool. Would I work with an LLM? Of course! Why not?" But she cautions against the view that AI's linguistic competence means that it can equal or exceed human expression. "Beyond the basics, meaning becomes a series of inner realities and language is wonderful at conveying those inner realities. Machines do not share our reality, not least because they don't have a limbic system. Humans cannot have a thought without a feeling ... literature is brilliant at revealing these layers." As I paste her quotes into a Google doc full of my notes, I notice the inbuilt AI making a suggestion. It asks whether I want to change Winterson's words to more closely "match the style" of the existing material: to smooth over the edges of one of the English language's most idiosyncratic writers. With an almost superstitious haste, I dismiss the prompt.