Is The Serpent in the Grove, one of the five regional winners of this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize, generated by AI? The story’s author, Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir, has a limited online presence and the work, some readers feel, bears the hallmarks of AI writing. The literary magazine Granta, which does not judge the prize but publishes all five winning entries, is reported to have submitted the short story to Anthropic’s Claude.ai, which concluded, in the words of the magazine’s publisher Sigrid Rausing, “that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’”. Nazir denies that the text was written by AI, questions the accuracy of so-called AI detectors, and writes that the story was inspired by memories from his childhood.
When reading the story, I found myself grappling with unwanted déjà vu. It did not remind me of when I ask ChatGPT to produce a polite bit of correspondence, or a firm complaint on my behalf. No, instead it reminded me of when, as a teenager, I discovered the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and tried, badly, to emulate their tone in my own writing. Smart-talking characters might have had “a tongue that could make concrete cry”, while a private detective (there was, of course, a detective) observed of a woman that “she spoke to the part of my family tree that rode horses out on the steppes of Eurasia”. I was not a prodigy.
In Nazir’s story, which is centred around a struggling farmer in rural Trinidad and Tobago, we are told a woman “moved quiet as if sound were taxed”. Another has “the kind of walking that made benches become men”. A third, and this is my favourite, is “big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture”. I have to be honest, none of the women in my life have ever apologised to furniture, and as such I am uncertain what size of woman we are talking about here. The lowest point in the text, though, was surely the following sentence: “shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesn’t rinse”. A sentence that gave me an insight into what it must be like to experience a stroke, if nothing else.