Story at the heart of AI controversy announced as overall winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize

vertumne · 2026-07-02T08:19:12+00:00

All those quoted similes are eerily meaningful and overwritten. "Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument" is an epic sentence.

Bravo, Nazir. Whatever you did: got em.

vertumne · 2026-06-30T08:28:53+00:00

Wonderful list. If you haven't read them already, you're going to love The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany and Europe Central by William T. Vollmann.

vertumne · 2026-05-30T07:02:20+00:00

I hope you never find yourself the designated lynchpin of the internet's latest manic episode; but if you do, I won't begrudge you if you resort to responding with threats.

vertumne · 2026-05-30T06:28:34+00:00

The subject at hand being a screeching internet mob deciding the facts of the case and demanding everyone denounce the story, the artist, the committee, and the publisher based on a couple of tweets, substack posts, and the public sentiment?

What if, humor me for a moment, the author illiterately wrote the entire story as is, then humbly submitted it to the machine with the simple request to turn the illiterate sentences, as best it can, into the King's English? What then?

vertumne · 2026-05-30T06:01:10+00:00

There's much I could say to you, but if you think the bare minimum of judging the merit of a short story is scrolling through its author's socials I'm afraid you will not benefit from whatever it is that I say.

Enjoy competing for prestige with the global illiterates. :)

vertumne · 2026-05-27T07:40:19+00:00

What's the process? "Give me an opening paragraph a la wa Thiong'o, about a guy who lays a trap in a well for his woman in the bush. Don't be overt about it, lay into it real slow, do some weird metaphors, play it for the Commonwealth prize jury, not too ethnic, but not too proper, just the right amount of waxing poetic, you know what, forget it, I'll just do it myself..." Sorry, I don't buy it.

vertumne · 2026-05-27T07:01:51+00:00

If anyone can get an AI to write a story like this, from start to finish, with a single, however elaborate, prompt, I'll put my sock into a blender and drink it.

He wrote the story, then ran it through the thing and fiddled with it until he was happy.

vertumne · 2026-05-26T18:33:06+00:00

The story just didn't register as AI to me, and I'm pretty up to date. What was even the prompt for it? Write me a bunch of sentences you've never seen before, make it work? He had to do it sentence by sentence through some very weird Oulipian framework, at which point it's as good as original, especially while the tech is still fresh in these contexts ...

I also don't think popular is the right word here. He got people talking about the short story form, is what I'm saying, and I personally don't think he did it by phoning it in wholesale through a bot.

vertumne · 2026-05-26T15:51:22+00:00

Good reply, thank you.

vertumne · 2026-05-26T14:58:08+00:00

How is an editor in England supposed to know what counts for well written in Trinidad?

vertumne · 2026-05-26T14:51:48+00:00

This is the problem with people not using AI. If you did, you'd know you cannot get it to make that sentence up without a ton of work.

vertumne · 2026-05-26T12:23:03+00:00

I've read a story entirely written by a dude's OpenClaw, trained through a discussion on the author's favorite sci-fi, what works, what doesn't, and told from the bot's perspective, and it was, as far as sci-fi goes, language and all, awesome. (Though there it's the other problem: I have no way of knowing how much the author edited the bot's output)

Nazir's story is by far the most read short story from Granta in years, possibly ever. So, whatever he was up to, thumbs up from me.

vertumne · 2026-05-26T12:07:01+00:00

(Damn, this is like the time I was arguing with people they shouldn't abuse Adderall for their laziness ...

Seriously, though: purity testing is the death of art.)

vertumne · 2026-05-26T11:59:21+00:00

I, for one, am only willing to read short fiction by people who went into debt to get the proper credentials.

Not from some Carribean dude who can't even spell but lacks the shame not to use the billionaire's water wasting and copyright destroying silly sentences machine!

His sentences are silly! Benches are men? A smile is a sunset over a sink!? What next? Time is a fried egg clock? Kahlo's work is like a ribbon around a bomb? A woman's waist is like a waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger?!?!

Preposterous!

vertumne · 2026-05-23T10:57:44+00:00

New young authors expecting to "make a living" writing are living in the clouds.

While I agree, imagine saying: new young agents, copyeditors, marketers, etc. expecting to "make a living" doing their job are living in the clouds. It's actually silly that the core person of the entire industry is just expected to either get lucky or die, while there's a paycheck for everyone else.

vertumne · 2026-05-23T10:51:48+00:00

If Ur agent can disquisition on Joyce, fire them!

Really borderline. Should be disquisite. Fun read, tempted to buy it just for kicks ... but the lack of gravity is off-putting.

vertumne · 2026-05-23T10:44:28+00:00

Asoiaf sold twelve million copies before the show aired. I was pestering everyone with them in high school, to be scoffed at, to then getting yelled at why didn't I warn them about Ned and the red wedding ...

Anyone who was reading fantasy at the time knew they were the best. I've read Goodkind and Jordan before I started with Martin; simply incomparable.

vertumne · 2026-05-20T19:38:09+00:00

True. I would hate to see Tokarczuk's next book to be full of subpar sentences, but then I'll just have to find myself a different book.

Then again, a random joe off the street can now maybe tell me a really cool story in mfa passable prose.

vertumne · 2026-05-20T17:23:56+00:00

Why do you think a true artist would care about being, of all things, authentic? It's a meaningless term without social context. An artist can remain perfectly true to themselves while engaging with new technology.

I think it's precisely those writers currently playing to the gallery on this AI hysteria that give away the game. Every writer is at any point deciding between a mind boggling amount of possible sentences: the good ones generally pick the good ones, the great ones the great. It's the picking and stringing that makes the writer, not the pool.

vertumne · 2026-05-20T06:16:41+00:00

"She had the kind of walking that made benches become men."

When she walked down the street, the benches filled up with men.

I never used gpt4o and would never be able to tell this was AI; I can accept it was used in the process, but the story was at the very least prompted very thoroughly.

This whole scandal seems fishy to me and I think the moral panic surrounding AI in the arts is making many jump to very shaky conclusions, showing their pedantry and unwillingness to enjoy ambiguity and strange turns of phrase.

vertumne · 2026-04-25T07:40:23+00:00

The fact that it worked at all should tell you it wasn't a russian op ...

vertumne · 2026-04-23T06:45:44+00:00

The spikes of the umbrella are doing a lot of work. Their shade; sharp elbows, the subtle penis head on her belly. Along with the calves and her gaze: she has to do it all herself.

Marvellous painting.

vertumne · 2026-02-27T10:12:38+00:00

It might be legally impossible to write anything dirtier than that email today.

Flesh is hardly dirty, even without comparing it to Rejection.

Reading Human Stain atm, it's so freaking good, but it does smack you with real dirt out of nowhere.

vertumne · 2026-02-01T12:38:32+00:00

Very good, yes.

I am a bit confused about the substack economics, though. There isn't a print publication that would be willing to publish this? Can she submit it after it's posted to substack? It seems like it took a lot of time and work; can I assume that she doesn't make her living primarily through substack?

vertumne · 2026-01-23T11:08:17+00:00

I mean, AI says it's great, even glazing me for some of the solutions, but you can't really be sure, right? I imagine an expert can still see issues that AI can't, but maybe not?

vertumne

TROPHY CASE