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Should we leave writing to AI? Even literary prize juries can’t identify good writing

The primary revelation of the Commonwealth Prize debacle is not that AI-generated writing is finally good—but that institutions that set the standard of good writing can now be questioned.

When ChatGPT and other generative AI tools were first released at the end of 2022, they were quickly, obviously, and anxiously recognised as proficient in a variety of creative domains.

AI soon created a song mimicking Drake and The Weeknd. A year later, it “Ghibli-fied” the internet by enabling anyone with access to the latest ChatGPT model to create images in the style of Hayao Miyazaki, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli. Hand-drawn, soft-palette imagery, which takes the animators at Studio Ghibli a month for a minute of finished footage, was now being generated in seconds with prompts like “render this picture of my wife, our computer, and I into a Studio Ghibli-style anime with soft, painterly textures and gentle linework.”

I watched people in these professions—music, design, the visual arts—squirm with a sort of glib satisfaction. As a writer, it seemed to me that writing of all kinds—comedy, fiction, ads, screenwriting, poetry, non-fiction, journalism—would remain the province of the human creator. AI-generated “slop” seemed to be so easily distinguishable from solid human writing.

But now, with the Commonwealth Short Story Prize being awarded to an allegedly, at least partially, AI-generated story, I am not so sure. The story was also carried by Granta, one of the world’s premier literary magazines.

AI writing is not suddenly on par with or better than human writing, but people at large, and the most hallowed literary institutions of our times, are all sufficiently confused about what good writing looks like.

Unlike code and mathematics, where sheer computation and machine learning techniques can create immense progress, writing is a sort of rule-based yet anti-obvious, consciousness-driven artform where just following the rules does not result in good output. Which is why an AI-written story, wholly or partially, being judged by experts in the field as award-winning is a turning point.

This isn’t about how........

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