After the Commonwealth Foundation announced the regional winners of its 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, many took to accusing winning stories of using text generated by AI. Arts writer Derek McArthur breaks down the situation and wonders if the literary world is past a point of no return.

Speculation is quickly erupting that top literary prizes were handed to stories containing AI-written text.

The prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which comes with a winning $5000 (£3700) and publication in respected UK literary magazine Granta, is under fire for handing prizes to what many suspect is either fully or partly written by a large language model such as ChatGPT.

The regional winner for the Caribbean region, Jamir Nazir’s The Serpent in the Grove, was the main story to come under suspicion. Speculation began when a user on X, a researcher and visiting scholar of AI at George Mason University, no less, raised the alarm after winners were announced. The author of the story is reportedly a 61-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago with few publications to his name. A book of love poems from 2018 comes from the author, as does a book of motivational quotes from 2019, but there is little to suggest that the author is anywhere near the level of winning incredibly competitive and prestigious literary competitions.

There were stylistic tells that, taken together, indicated the use of a large language model. The now infamous ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ sentence structure that AI has........

© Herald Scotland