AI stories aren’t inevitably ‘not art’
Exercising our own judgment when it comes to quality is something we should not outsource to machines.
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AI can already do many tasks for us. But the purpose of that ought to be to free up our time for more rewarding tasks and to sharpen our judgment, not let it fall into disuse, says the writer.
PHOTO: UNSPLASH
Stephen Bush
Is The Serpent In The Grove, one of the five regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, generated by AI? The story’s author, Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir, has a limited online presence and the work, some readers feel, bears the hallmarks of AI writing. The literary magazine Granta, which does not judge the prize but publishes all five winning entries, is reported to have submitted the short story to Anthropic’s Claude.ai, which concluded, in the words of the magazine’s publisher Sigrid Rausing, “that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’”. Nazir denies that the text was written by artificial intelligence, questions the accuracy of so-called AI detectors, and writes that the story was inspired by memories from his childhood.
When reading the story, I found myself grappling with unwanted deja vu. It did not remind me of when I ask ChatGPT to produce a polite bit of correspondence, or a firm complaint on my behalf. No, instead it reminded me of when, as a teenager, I discovered the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and tried, badly, to emulate their tone in my own writing. Smart-talking characters might have had “a tongue that could make concrete cry”, while a private detective (there was, of course, a detective) observed of a woman that “she spoke to the part of my family tree that rode horses out on the steppes of Eurasia”. I was not a prodigy.
