Did AI Write a Prize-Winning Story? Does It Matter?

In early May, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners for its influential Short Story Prize, which recognizes unpublished short fiction. One of the awardees, a Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir, was accused of A.I.-assisted cheating by a broad array of social-media users who seized upon his story’s synthetic tics, glitchy metaphors, and general unreadability. (“They called her Zoongie,” one passage from the story goes. “Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.”) In a statement, Razmi Farook, the director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, said that contestants had confirmed to the Foundation that they had not used A.I., and that the authors of the short-listed stories had made this attestation twice. The next day, on a call with the Times, Farook allowed that the moment had perhaps come to “look at ourselves internally to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough.”