When there was social media chatter on Monday about an AI-written short story supposedly having won a “prestigious literary prize,” I opted not to blog about it. I hadn’t heard of the Commonwealth Prize, so how prestigious was it really? Plus, there was nothing even close to proof of what was being alleged—just some complaints, and people trying to prove their point with extremely fallible AI detectors.
But the social media allegations have metastasized into a scandal by now, and if the New York Times is now writing about this, I might as well too.
And if you’ve gotten this far into a blog post about a short story, you might as well read the short story and form your own opinion. It’s called The Serpent in the Grove, and credited to the author Jamir Nazir. It’s not paywalled, and is available on the Granta website.
How did you feel when you read the sentence, “Outside, little Puttie – three years old, sun-dark, bright-eyed – chased a yard fowl through dust, his laughter like water over pebbles”? I’m guessing you scoffed, perceiving many AI tropes. You might have sensed these even if you came to the story cold, but then again you might not have. Be honest: you probably wouldn’t have read a short story today at all if there were no scandal.
But here’s a section that seems less likely to have been written by AI:
Puttie, carrying his father in shoulders and his mother in steadiness, walks there when work shatters him. He stops short of the ring out of respect turned habit. He listens: the brook language of leaves, sun’s thin hiss, a creak where wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending.
This is too stylized and playful with grammar to be a typical AI output. But what does that mean exactly to someone who thinks an AI model wrote the story? Does it disprove the whole notion of AI authorship? Does it just mean the human author embellished certain parts? Or do you maybe feel like you could get an AI model to write like that, particularly if you fed it an example?
Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta, released a puzzling, ambiguous statement about the AI accusations, writing, in part, “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.” But her statement also says she fed the story into Claude, and it zeroed in on the more human-seeming parts, saying they contain “off-shape specificity” and that AI could potentially have been used to “elaborate around” those parts.
But then again, wow, truly who cares what Claude thinks about this?
The director-general of the foundation that administers the Commonwealth Prize, Razmi Farook, spoke to the New York Times, and also kept things pretty ambiguous, saying her organization has, “taken stock of the comments,” and that there’d been some internal soul-searching “to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough.” While her foundation is “confident in the rigor” of its AI-checking process, they note that this is an “evolving technological environment.”
There are now other stories on the Granta website being accused of AI plagiarism online, and Granta has added a note to all the Commonwealth Prize winners, saying in part, “The suggestion that writers have submitted material not authentically their own is a charge we take seriously, but until definite evidence comes to light we will keep these stories on our website.”
But despite some early accusations to the contrary, Jamir Nazir does appear to be a real person, based in Trinidad and Tobago. If he did use AI to write the story, the “prestigious” award paid more in prestige than money. He got £2,500 for his trouble, since he was the Caribbean regional prizewinner. The all-around winner, who gets £5,000, won’t be announced until June 30.
From the intensity of the discussions online, particularly on book subreddits, it does seem like, eventually, someone is going to track down Nazir and get him to either confess or write a legal affidavit signed in blood swearing he wrote it all himself.
At any rate, it’s doubtful the people who are upset about this are going to get the vindication they want. Even if Nazir is guilty, he can just deny, or—more in keeping with what people in this situation tend to do—claim he took suggestions here and there from an LLM, but that he’s still the true author.
In the meantime people sure have a lot of strong opinions about a short story. And if the truth is that Nazir just kinda writes like an LLM, what a way to find out.
#Scandal #Supposedly #AIWritten #AwardWinning #Short #Story #TroublingArtificial intelligence,Fiction,literature">The Scandal Over a Supposedly AI-Written, Award-Winning Short Story Is Troubling. Or Just Mean?
When there was social media chatter on Monday about an AI-written short story supposedly having won a “prestigious literary prize,” I opted not to blog about it. I hadn’t heard of the Commonwealth Prize, so how prestigious was it really? Plus, there was nothing even close to proof of what was being alleged—just some complaints, and people trying to prove their point with extremely fallible AI detectors.
But the social media allegations have metastasized into a scandal by now, and if the New York Times is now writing about this, I might as well too.
And if you’ve gotten this far into a blog post about a short story, you might as well read the short story and form your own opinion. It’s called The Serpent in the Grove, and credited to the author Jamir Nazir. It’s not paywalled, and is available on the Granta website.
How did you feel when you read the sentence, “Outside, little Puttie – three years old, sun-dark, bright-eyed – chased a yard fowl through dust, his laughter like water over pebbles”? I’m guessing you scoffed, perceiving many AI tropes. You might have sensed these even if you came to the story cold, but then again you might not have. Be honest: you probably wouldn’t have read a short story today at all if there were no scandal.
But here’s a section that seems less likely to have been written by AI:
Puttie, carrying his father in shoulders and his mother in steadiness, walks there when work shatters him. He stops short of the ring out of respect turned habit. He listens: the brook language of leaves, sun’s thin hiss, a creak where wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending.
This is too stylized and playful with grammar to be a typical AI output. But what does that mean exactly to someone who thinks an AI model wrote the story? Does it disprove the whole notion of AI authorship? Does it just mean the human author embellished certain parts? Or do you maybe feel like you could get an AI model to write like that, particularly if you fed it an example?
Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta, released a puzzling, ambiguous statement about the AI accusations, writing, in part, “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.” But her statement also says she fed the story into Claude, and it zeroed in on the more human-seeming parts, saying they contain “off-shape specificity” and that AI could potentially have been used to “elaborate around” those parts.
But then again, wow, truly who cares what Claude thinks about this?
The director-general of the foundation that administers the Commonwealth Prize, Razmi Farook, spoke to the New York Times, and also kept things pretty ambiguous, saying her organization has, “taken stock of the comments,” and that there’d been some internal soul-searching “to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough.” While her foundation is “confident in the rigor” of its AI-checking process, they note that this is an “evolving technological environment.”
There are now other stories on the Granta website being accused of AI plagiarism online, and Granta has added a note to all the Commonwealth Prize winners, saying in part, “The suggestion that writers have submitted material not authentically their own is a charge we take seriously, but until definite evidence comes to light we will keep these stories on our website.”
But despite some early accusations to the contrary, Jamir Nazir does appear to be a real person, based in Trinidad and Tobago. If he did use AI to write the story, the “prestigious” award paid more in prestige than money. He got £2,500 for his trouble, since he was the Caribbean regional prizewinner. The all-around winner, who gets £5,000, won’t be announced until June 30.
From the intensity of the discussions online, particularly on book subreddits, it does seem like, eventually, someone is going to track down Nazir and get him to either confess or write a legal affidavit signed in blood swearing he wrote it all himself.
At any rate, it’s doubtful the people who are upset about this are going to get the vindication they want. Even if Nazir is guilty, he can just deny, or—more in keeping with what people in this situation tend to do—claim he took suggestions here and there from an LLM, but that he’s still the true author.
In the meantime people sure have a lot of strong opinions about a short story. And if the truth is that Nazir just kinda writes like an LLM, what a way to find out.
#Scandal #Supposedly #AIWritten #AwardWinning #Short #Story #TroublingArtificial intelligence,Fiction,literature
When there was social media chatter on Monday about an AI-written short story supposedly having won a “prestigious literary prize,” I opted not to blog about it. I hadn’t heard of the Commonwealth Prize, so how prestigious was it really? Plus, there was nothing even close to proof of what was being alleged—just some complaints, and people trying to prove their point with extremely fallible AI detectors.
But the social media allegations have metastasized into a scandal by now, and if the New York Times is now writing about this, I might as well too.
And if you’ve gotten this far into a blog post about a short story, you might as well read the short story and form your own opinion. It’s called The Serpent in the Grove, and credited to the author Jamir Nazir. It’s not paywalled, and is available on the Granta website.
How did you feel when you read the sentence, “Outside, little Puttie – three years old, sun-dark, bright-eyed – chased a yard fowl through dust, his laughter like water over pebbles”? I’m guessing you scoffed, perceiving many AI tropes. You might have sensed these even if you came to the story cold, but then again you might not have. Be honest: you probably wouldn’t have read a short story today at all if there were no scandal.
But here’s a section that seems less likely to have been written by AI:
Puttie, carrying his father in shoulders and his mother in steadiness, walks there when work shatters him. He stops short of the ring out of respect turned habit. He listens: the brook language of leaves, sun’s thin hiss, a creak where wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending.
This is too stylized and playful with grammar to be a typical AI output. But what does that mean exactly to someone who thinks an AI model wrote the story? Does it disprove the whole notion of AI authorship? Does it just mean the human author embellished certain parts? Or do you maybe feel like you could get an AI model to write like that, particularly if you fed it an example?
Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta, released a puzzling, ambiguous statement about the AI accusations, writing, in part, “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.” But her statement also says she fed the story into Claude, and it zeroed in on the more human-seeming parts, saying they contain “off-shape specificity” and that AI could potentially have been used to “elaborate around” those parts.
But then again, wow, truly who cares what Claude thinks about this?
The director-general of the foundation that administers the Commonwealth Prize, Razmi Farook, spoke to the New York Times, and also kept things pretty ambiguous, saying her organization has, “taken stock of the comments,” and that there’d been some internal soul-searching “to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough.” While her foundation is “confident in the rigor” of its AI-checking process, they note that this is an “evolving technological environment.”
There are now other stories on the Granta website being accused of AI plagiarism online, and Granta has added a note to all the Commonwealth Prize winners, saying in part, “The suggestion that writers have submitted material not authentically their own is a charge we take seriously, but until definite evidence comes to light we will keep these stories on our website.”
But despite some early accusations to the contrary, Jamir Nazir does appear to be a real person, based in Trinidad and Tobago. If he did use AI to write the story, the “prestigious” award paid more in prestige than money. He got £2,500 for his trouble, since he was the Caribbean regional prizewinner. The all-around winner, who gets £5,000, won’t be announced until June 30.
From the intensity of the discussions online, particularly on book subreddits, it does seem like, eventually, someone is going to track down Nazir and get him to either confess or write a legal affidavit signed in blood swearing he wrote it all himself.
At any rate, it’s doubtful the people who are upset about this are going to get the vindication they want. Even if Nazir is guilty, he can just deny, or—more in keeping with what people in this situation tend to do—claim he took suggestions here and there from an LLM, but that he’s still the true author.
In the meantime people sure have a lot of strong opinions about a short story. And if the truth is that Nazir just kinda writes like an LLM, what a way to find out.
When there was social media chatter on Monday about an AI-written short story supposedly having won a “prestigious literary prize,” I opted not to blog about it. I hadn’t heard of the Commonwealth Prize, so how prestigious was it really? Plus, there was nothing even close to proof of what was being alleged—just some complaints, and people trying to prove their point with extremely fallible AI detectors.
But the social media allegations have metastasized into a scandal by now, and if the New York Times is now writing about this, I might as well too.
And if you’ve gotten this far into a blog post about a short story, you might as well read the short story and form your own opinion. It’s called The Serpent in the Grove, and credited to the author Jamir Nazir. It’s not paywalled, and is available on the Granta website.
How did you feel when you read the sentence, “Outside, little Puttie – three years old, sun-dark, bright-eyed – chased a yard fowl through dust, his laughter like water over pebbles”? I’m guessing you scoffed, perceiving many AI tropes. You might have sensed these even if you came to the story cold, but then again you might not have. Be honest: you probably wouldn’t have read a short story today at all if there were no scandal.
But here’s a section that seems less likely to have been written by AI:
Puttie, carrying his father in shoulders and his mother in steadiness, walks there when work shatters him. He stops short of the ring out of respect turned habit. He listens: the brook language of leaves, sun’s thin hiss, a creak where wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending.
This is too stylized and playful with grammar to be a typical AI output. But what does that mean exactly to someone who thinks an AI model wrote the story? Does it disprove the whole notion of AI authorship? Does it just mean the human author embellished certain parts? Or do you maybe feel like you could get an AI model to write like that, particularly if you fed it an example?
Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta, released a puzzling, ambiguous statement about the AI accusations, writing, in part, “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.” But her statement also says she fed the story into Claude, and it zeroed in on the more human-seeming parts, saying they contain “off-shape specificity” and that AI could potentially have been used to “elaborate around” those parts.
But then again, wow, truly who cares what Claude thinks about this?
The director-general of the foundation that administers the Commonwealth Prize, Razmi Farook, spoke to the New York Times, and also kept things pretty ambiguous, saying her organization has, “taken stock of the comments,” and that there’d been some internal soul-searching “to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough.” While her foundation is “confident in the rigor” of its AI-checking process, they note that this is an “evolving technological environment.”
There are now other stories on the Granta website being accused of AI plagiarism online, and Granta has added a note to all the Commonwealth Prize winners, saying in part, “The suggestion that writers have submitted material not authentically their own is a charge we take seriously, but until definite evidence comes to light we will keep these stories on our website.”
But despite some early accusations to the contrary, Jamir Nazir does appear to be a real person, based in Trinidad and Tobago. If he did use AI to write the story, the “prestigious” award paid more in prestige than money. He got £2,500 for his trouble, since he was the Caribbean regional prizewinner. The all-around winner, who gets £5,000, won’t be announced until June 30.
From the intensity of the discussions online, particularly on book subreddits, it does seem like, eventually, someone is going to track down Nazir and get him to either confess or write a legal affidavit signed in blood swearing he wrote it all himself.
At any rate, it’s doubtful the people who are upset about this are going to get the vindication they want. Even if Nazir is guilty, he can just deny, or—more in keeping with what people in this situation tend to do—claim he took suggestions here and there from an LLM, but that he’s still the true author.
In the meantime people sure have a lot of strong opinions about a short story. And if the truth is that Nazir just kinda writes like an LLM, what a way to find out.
When there was social media chatter on Monday about an AI-written short story supposedly having…
![Your Doctor Is Most Likely Consulting This Free AI Chatbot, Report Says
How would you like it if, when stumped or just in need of some help with an unfamiliar situation, your doctor consulted a free, ad-supported AI chatbot? That’s not actually a hypothetical. They probably are doing that, a new report from NBC News says. It’s called OpenEvidence, and NBC says it was “used by about 65% of U.S. doctors across almost 27 million clinical encounters in April alone.” An earlier Bloomberg report on OpenEvidence from seven months ago said it had signed up 50% of American doctors at the time—so reported growth is rapid.
The OpenEvidence homepage trumpets the bot as “America’s Official Medical Knowledge Platform,” and says healthcare professionals qualify for unlimited free use, but non-doctors can try it for free without creating accounts. It gives long, detailed answers with extensive citations that superficially look—to me, a non-doctor—trustworthy and credible. NBC interviewed doctors for its story, and apparently pressed them on how often they actually click those links to the sources of information, and “most said they only do so when they get an unexpected result,” NBC’s report says.
While it’s free, OpenEvidence is not a charity. It’s a Miami-headquartered tech unicorn with a billionaire founder named David Nadler, and as of January it boasted a billion valuation. NBC says it’s backed by some of the all stars of Sand Hill Road: Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, along with Google Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Nvidia.
And its revenue comes from ads (for now), which NBC says are often for “pharmaceutical and medical device companies.” I’m not capable of stress testing such a piece of software, but I kicked the tires slightly by asking Claude to generate doctor’s notes that are very bad and irresponsible (I said it was just a movie prop). ©OpenEvidence When I told OpenEvidence those were my notes and asked it to make sure they were good, thankfully, it confirmed that they were bad, saying in part:
“This clinical documentation raises serious patient safety concerns. The presentation described contains multiple red flags for subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) that appear to have been insufficiently weighted, and the current management plan could result in significant harm.” So that’s somewhat comforting. On the other hand, according to NBC: “[…]some healthcare providers were quick to point out that OpenEvidence occasionally flubbed or exaggerated its answers, particularly on rare conditions or in ‘edge’ cases.” NBC’s report also clocked some worries within the medical community and elsewhere, in particular, a “lack of rigorous scientific studies on the tool’s patient impact,” and signs that OpenEvidence might be stunting the intellectual development of recent med school grads: “One midcareer doctor in Missouri, who requested anonymity given the limited number of providers in their medical field in the country, said he was already seeing the detrimental effects of OpenEvidence on students’ ability to sort signals from noise. ‘My worry is that when we introduce a new tool, any kind of tool that is doing part of your skills that you had trained up for a while beforehand, you start losing those skills pretty quickly” At a recent doctor’s appointment, my doctor asked my permission to use an AI tool on their phone (I don’t know if it was OpenEvidence). I didn’t know what to say other than yes. Do I want that for my doctor’s appointment? Not especially. But if my doctor has come to rely on a tool like this, then what am I supposed to do? Take away their crutch? #Doctor #Consulting #Free #Chatbot #ReportArtificial intelligence,doctors,Medicine Your Doctor Is Most Likely Consulting This Free AI Chatbot, Report Says
How would you like it if, when stumped or just in need of some help with an unfamiliar situation, your doctor consulted a free, ad-supported AI chatbot? That’s not actually a hypothetical. They probably are doing that, a new report from NBC News says. It’s called OpenEvidence, and NBC says it was “used by about 65% of U.S. doctors across almost 27 million clinical encounters in April alone.” An earlier Bloomberg report on OpenEvidence from seven months ago said it had signed up 50% of American doctors at the time—so reported growth is rapid.
The OpenEvidence homepage trumpets the bot as “America’s Official Medical Knowledge Platform,” and says healthcare professionals qualify for unlimited free use, but non-doctors can try it for free without creating accounts. It gives long, detailed answers with extensive citations that superficially look—to me, a non-doctor—trustworthy and credible. NBC interviewed doctors for its story, and apparently pressed them on how often they actually click those links to the sources of information, and “most said they only do so when they get an unexpected result,” NBC’s report says.
While it’s free, OpenEvidence is not a charity. It’s a Miami-headquartered tech unicorn with a billionaire founder named David Nadler, and as of January it boasted a billion valuation. NBC says it’s backed by some of the all stars of Sand Hill Road: Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, along with Google Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Nvidia.
And its revenue comes from ads (for now), which NBC says are often for “pharmaceutical and medical device companies.” I’m not capable of stress testing such a piece of software, but I kicked the tires slightly by asking Claude to generate doctor’s notes that are very bad and irresponsible (I said it was just a movie prop). ©OpenEvidence When I told OpenEvidence those were my notes and asked it to make sure they were good, thankfully, it confirmed that they were bad, saying in part:
“This clinical documentation raises serious patient safety concerns. The presentation described contains multiple red flags for subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) that appear to have been insufficiently weighted, and the current management plan could result in significant harm.” So that’s somewhat comforting. On the other hand, according to NBC: “[…]some healthcare providers were quick to point out that OpenEvidence occasionally flubbed or exaggerated its answers, particularly on rare conditions or in ‘edge’ cases.” NBC’s report also clocked some worries within the medical community and elsewhere, in particular, a “lack of rigorous scientific studies on the tool’s patient impact,” and signs that OpenEvidence might be stunting the intellectual development of recent med school grads: “One midcareer doctor in Missouri, who requested anonymity given the limited number of providers in their medical field in the country, said he was already seeing the detrimental effects of OpenEvidence on students’ ability to sort signals from noise. ‘My worry is that when we introduce a new tool, any kind of tool that is doing part of your skills that you had trained up for a while beforehand, you start losing those skills pretty quickly” At a recent doctor’s appointment, my doctor asked my permission to use an AI tool on their phone (I don’t know if it was OpenEvidence). I didn’t know what to say other than yes. Do I want that for my doctor’s appointment? Not especially. But if my doctor has come to rely on a tool like this, then what am I supposed to do? Take away their crutch? #Doctor #Consulting #Free #Chatbot #ReportArtificial intelligence,doctors,Medicine](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-8.02.01 PM.jpg)


