The Work of AI Winning Literary Prizes

A Bluesky thread — perish the thought! — crossed my newsfeeding trough yesterday morning between sets of Larsen presses and Kroc rows. Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor who tracks what generative AI is doing to schools and offices (many such stories, too many to recount here), had run the Caribbean-region winner of this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize through Pangram, an AI detector that claims 99-percent accuracy with a very low false-positive rate.1