The AI-Generated Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner Is a Sham

and I May Have Been a Part of It

This past weekend, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the winners of its Short Story Prize, which annually honors five writers, one in each of five global regions, with, among other rewards, the opportunity to publish their submissions in Granta. Not long after the announcements, numerous social media sleuths read the story and used AI-detection software to determine that it was almost certainly written, or at least enhanced, using AI. Understandably, writers across the literary ecosystem are scandalized by the revelation. Normally, I would count myself among the writers so scandalized. However, I’m unable to pass any unbiased judgment on these particular goings-on, because I may or may not have played a role in them myself.

As I detailed in one of my earlier posts, several years ago now, I was employed for a time by a startup “incubator” conducting research and media “strategy” campaigns treating very specific topics of interest, namely the then-emerging “Internet novel” trend. At the time, the Internet novel was the focus of most debates about the intersection of literature and digital technology, which this organization existed to support—or, more accurately, manipulate. As part of my work for this company, I created a large number of fake social media accounts, and used them to stimulate discussion of novels with a “high yield” position on digital technology, particularly the products the larger tech superpower funding our nominally not-for-profit organization aimed to market.

Not long into my tenure there, our funders unceremoniously dissolved our organization, and we were all laid off. However, no part of our offboarding process included canceling these many fake accounts we created. In fact, I remember occasionally checking up on some of them to see that, not only were they still active, but they still produced occasional updates, mostly around the times the company was publicizing a major new release. I even managed to log into a few of them, mostly to post occasional non-sequiturs or overtly anticapitalist statements. No one ever contacted me to try to stop me from doing so, but the posts never stayed up for long.

I hadn’t thought much in recent years about this frustrating chapter in my career, until I started looking into Jamir Nazir, the author of “The Serpent in the Grove,” the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in the Caribbean region. According to Nazir’s LinkedIn account, he works in “organizational transformation and business expansion” in the tech sector. Many of his posts offer concise but clear perspective on common challenges and obstacles cited by companies seeking increased integration, adoption, and expansion of available AI technology, like balancing compute demands with supply of natural resources and scaling data-driven models without reproducing institutional bias.

All of these posts, down to the keywords they disproportionately repeat, conform directly to the templates and style guides I was instructed to use on the job for my own dummy posts. Nazir hasn’t posted about the internet novel, but not long after my team was dismissed, the company pivoted across its marketing channels to pushing its AI models and solutions, and many of the accounts I had created went from debating the impact of the death of print on literature to mindlessly explaining how brands and independent producers can use LLMs and GPTs to “streamline creative workflows” and “optimize storytelling.”

Obviously, I can’t prove that Jamir Nazir is not a real person, or that a company that used to fund a non-profit of which I was once an employee is now ghostwriting posts under his name after assuming ownership of all of my contributions. All I can say is that, from what I know about this company, inventing an author with a deep investment in AI adoption, writing a short story using AI, and submitting it to contests under his name as some kind of bid in favor of AI as the future of reading and writing would not fail to meet its minimal standards for professional ethics. What the whole affair suggests about the future of reading and writing itself, I’m almost afraid to guess, but I doubt it’s anything good.