I had trouble processing this news. As someone who has been a fan of stories since childhood and grew up on the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Terry Pratchett, JRR Tolkien, and other such respected authors, seeing an AI-written story win a prestigious literary award is hard to digest.
If you don’t know, the winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize have been announced, and three of the five winning regional stories have been found to be written in whole or in part by AI. Or at least that seems to be the consensus among students. As a reader and writer of early fiction, this has hurt me more than any other story of AI ruining our lives.
So, what are the issues under the scanner?
It all started when Granta published the five regional winners of a news writing contest. Users on X quickly discovered that some of the writing styles in the story were eerily similar to AI-generated content.
Researcher Nabeel S. Qureshi called it X, pointing to what he described as the book’s AI syntax. AI discovery tool Pangram marked the story as 100% AI-generated, a result that WIRED independently confirmed.
Pangram also flagged “The Bastion’s Shadow” by Maltese author John Edward DeMicoli as entirely AI-generated, and “Mehendi Nights” by Indian author Sharon Aruparayil as partially AI-generated. Only Holly Ann Miller and Lisa-Anne Julien’s stories came back as fully written.
Regarding how this went, Razmi Farook, Director-General of the Commonwealth Foundation, issued a statement saying that AI test users to check the authenticity of the news. “Giving unpublished original work to an AI tester would raise serious concerns about permission and artistic ownership,” he said.
Granta, on the other hand, says its editors were not involved in planning or selecting the shortlisted stories. More importantly, Granta said he used an AI tool, Anthropic’s Claude, to check for AI cheating. The results, he says, were not perfect. As a result, the publication decided to keep those stories on its website, and not take any action against them.
Of course, no AI detector is 100 percent accurate, and the creators of these tools caution against “full faith” in them. A very sad and deeply sad scene. You see a pattern here. We use AI tools to ensure that the content was not generated using AI, It is strange, and I can even read criticism of this change of events written by a person, of course.
High-level competition should not depend on the honor system
I sympathize with the foundation and the judges. It’s not easy to mark a piece of text as AI-generated with 100% fidelity. However, we can no longer rely on the honor system. Even Princeton University had to abandon its honor code and resort to proctored exams for the first time in 133 years.
I’m not against using AI writing tools. I even use it to complete mundane tasks like answering emails and summarizing long texts for bite-size consumption. And while I don’t agree with using AI to create stories, I don’t have a problem with people who do, as long as they clearly mark their work as AI-generated.
Using AI-written stories to compete with other writers who suffer from imposter syndrome and pour their emotions into their work is not only wrong but also a profound betrayal of the human vulnerability and knowledge upon which traditional storytelling is built.
It is a creative act that brings great joy when you reach the final moment in your story or novel. Using cheap AI stories to compete is nothing but a money grab, and those writers who engage in this should be banned from any future competitions.
As research has shown time and time again, people are finding it increasingly difficult to find AI content, and in a blind test, we choose it. Oh, let’s not forget, AI is making us dumb, too. But all is not lost, I guess. As Sir Terry Pratchett wrote in Hogfather, “Real stupidity always beats artificial intelligence.” And I have a lot of faith in our stupidity to overcome any challenges AI throws at us.