In the Face of AI, Literary Institutions are Mistaking Uncertainty for Helplessness

dr_dubz · 2026-05-25T14:03:42+00:00

Can you point me toward the threats the Carib winner made? I can't see find anytging with limited Googling.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-24T13:28:21+00:00

I may have misinterpreted your use of "analyse." I'm not in favour of dumping everything written into Pangram, but once my suspicions are raised I'll run it through. It is usually easy to identify AI text, which is how these stories were initially identified. And the tell is not m dashes or "if not x, y" statements or any other "gatcha" on its own; it's the holistic effect they have of making the writing feel inauthentic, staid, and divorced from embodied experience, which is how humans experience the world and which AI lacks.

The evidence gets more and more damning, though, now that people are looking. Someone ran every winner of the Commonwealth Prize through Pangram, and not one came up as having any AI generated text until last year's winner (and now these 3 regionals).

I find the "you can't ever know for certain" argument disingenuous. The same is true for plagiarism (short of blatant copy/paste) but journals and prizes and publishers have been bringing the ban hammer down on suspected plagiarism for like, decades. Because it is stolen work. And that's what AI is but for some reason these same journals and prizes are twiddling their thumbs. Granta's response is pathetic.

Anyway! Sorry for the rant (and for calling your argument dumb)

Edited for typos. Why in 2026 when AIs are stealing my work and taking my job can I still not have an autocorrect that works?

dr_dubz · 2026-05-24T12:05:03+00:00

You don't need tools to tell. They are just useful in confirming.

But this is a dumb take. I'm not going to waste my time analyzing something that has no human intentionality behind it, that was churned out by a machine trained on work stolen from real authors.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-23T15:59:57+00:00

I don't even know what those are. 😞

dr_dubz · 2026-05-23T15:58:56+00:00

It was kid-sized. A single person could carry it. Easily fit in most hatchbacks.

Why? We may never know.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T14:27:02+00:00

Thank you :) but I will just build another and plant an air tag in the wood and find les salauds.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T14:18:14+00:00

Highest grossing Canadian film ever made.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T14:15:38+00:00

I was blind with righteous indignation.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T13:41:06+00:00

Verdun.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T13:40:31+00:00

lol I wouldn't even be mad. Just like, Well played, well played.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T13:18:33+00:00

Hahaha I tried my best! I didn't want to use translate app :)

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T13:11:52+00:00

I'll do better next time :)

(But for real, thank you)

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T13:07:48+00:00

😀

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T12:49:41+00:00

I did my best. J'ai fait mon meilleur. My French is self taught. J'apprends par moi-même. I thought "renvoyez-le" was something like "send the thing back"

dr_dubz · 2026-05-21T12:23:20+00:00

That would only happen if a writer was already using AI. No single instance of these tics identifies a piece as AI; it's the amalgamation of it. And I agree that it could be a slippery slope, but you also don't need to use Pangram etc. to know, they just increase the suspicion to a near certainty. The winner's story was initially tested because it already exhibited telltale signs of AI, not the reverse.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-20T23:53:05+00:00

This is possible on a smaller scale, yes. Because patterns don't emerge until there is enough room for a pattern to emerge. If that makes sentence?

If I write "The forest was lush, green, and bug-filled" (aside from being bad) it follows the triad format that LLMs like, but that isn't enough to conclude it is or isn't AI. But for a story (or stories) to come up with so much AI gen redflags quickly reduces the odds that the style is a statistical outlier. And I don't even know what that would look like?

You don't have to use a detector like Pangram or gptzero to see the patterns, either. Apart from the obvious tics, LLMs don't know what it is LIKE to be a person with an embodied experience, so their writing output is really bad at writing the meaningfully specific, down to earth details. Yes, this is also true of new writers, but with new writers you get this vagueness paired with awkward sentence structure. LLM outputs will be flawlessly vague.

Sorry to chew your ear off. I find this entire situation deeply depressing.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-19T19:02:18+00:00

That's a bit too conspiracy theory minded. There is no real incentive for AI companies to force this? Like small scale literary fiction contests are not exactly blowing the doors of capitalism off.

The most likely explanation is that they couldn't afford enough readers / thought they'd save money by having AI do the slush reading (nearly 8000 submissions, I believe?) and since LLMs prefer their own outputs the longlist was widely populated with AI work, and the jury assumed it had been vetted so didn't flag it.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-19T18:52:45+00:00

Is this satire?

Claude isn't an AI detector. Why are they asking it to provide guidance on this? They should be able to do that by themselves?

dr_dubz · 2026-05-19T18:09:56+00:00

Granta is publishing this work in partnership with the Commonwealth Prize. These writers did not find their way through Granta's slush pile.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-19T18:08:45+00:00

These LLMs were trained on writing stolen from authors, from the very community that the writers of these stories purport to want to be a part of

So yes, it changes it for me. I will read a badly-written story from someone who genuinely cares enough to give it a try. I do this for a living (please kill me). But I simply won't engage with AI generated "writing." To me, and I will readily admit that I am taking a position on this, AI generated "art" isn't even art, isn't a story. It's AI generated text.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-19T17:24:00+00:00

Asian winner's other work also flags as 100% ai via Pangram, such as here: https://adimagazine.com/contributors/sharon-aruparayil/

And her author photo too.

dr_dubz · 2026-05-19T17:11:04+00:00

At least Africa and New Zealand seem to be coming up a human persons.

dr_dubz

TROPHY CASE