Casey Newton

The first is that an award-winning short story has been criticized by people who think that it was generated by AI.

Oh, boy.

This story was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Foundation's Short Story Prize.

It's called The Serpent in the Grove by Jameer Nazir of Trinidad, and it was published online by the British literary magazine Granta, but some readers thought, hey,

hey, this thing seems a lot like AI.

It had some of the cliches of AI writing, and people claim to have run this through Pangram, the AI detection tool, and found that the story appeared to be significantly or entirely generated by AI.

We have figured out how to rescue fiction, and it is just to create controversies around AI.

The Commonwealth Foundation responded to these accusations, saying in a statement that they, quote, "...place our confidence in the integrity of our contributors and the caliber and experience of the judges and chair of the judging panel and stand by the assurances given by our authors as part of our process."

And I mean, look, like we don't know.

This is, I predict, like a thing that is going to happen to every major literary prize is that every submission will just have to be run through an AI detector.

It's not a trend.

It's a transformation.

There's another writing scandal that came to light this week, this one in the nonfiction world.

This was according to my colleague Ben Mullen at The Times, who wrote that a buzzy new book called The Future of Truth, which is about truth in the age of AI, appears to have included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by AI.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, acknowledged the errors on Monday.

He said that he took full responsibility for the errors, that he used AI tools like ChatGPT and Cloud during the research, writing, and editing process,

and that he was working to correct future additions.

Yeah, and I would say it's not just laziness.

There are a lot of things that AI tools can help you with on books.

I've been using AI not for writing my book.