I had a hard time processing this news. As someone who has been deeply in love with stories since childhood and who grew up on the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Terry Pratchett, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other such venerable authors, seeing an AI-written story win a prestigious writing award is hard to digest.
If you are unaware, the winners for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for 2026 were announced, and three of the five winning regional stories have been found to be entirely or partially written by AI. Or at least that seems to be the consensus among readers. As a reader and an amateur fiction writer, this hurt me deeper than any other tale of AI corroding our lives.
So, which stories are under the scanner?
It all started when Granta published the five regional winners of the story writing competition. Users on X quickly figured out that some of the writing styles in the story were eerily similar to AI-generated content.
Researcher Nabeel S. Qureshi called it out on X, pointing to what he described as textbook AI syntax. AI detection tool Pangram flagged the story as 100% AI-generated, a result that WIRED independently confirmed.
Pangram also flagged “The Bastion’s Shadow” by Maltese writer John Edward DeMicoli as fully AI-generated, and “Mehendi Nights” by Indian writer Sharon Aruparayil as partially AI-generated. Only the stories by Holly Ann Miller and Lisa-Anne Julien came back as fully human-written.
As to how this passed, Razmi Farook, the Director-General of the Commonwealth Foundation, released a statement saying they don’t use AI checkers to check the authenticity of the stories. “To supply unpublished original work to an AI checker would raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership,” he said.
Granta, on the other hand, says its editors did not participate in editing or selection of the shortlisted stories. More importantly, Granta said it used an AI tool, Anthropic’s Claude, to test for AI plagiarism. The results, it says, were inconclusive. As a result, the publication has decided to keep those stories on its website, and not take any action against them.
Of course, no AI detector is hundred percent accurate, and even the creators of these tools warn against “total belief” in them. It’s a laughably sad and deeply concerning situation. You see the pattern here. We are using AI tools to prove a content was not generated using AI, It’s ironic, and I would even read a critique of this turn of events written by a human, of course.
A prestigious competition shouldn’t rely on the honor system
I sympathize with the foundation and the judges. It’s not easy to tag a piece of writing as AI-generated with 100% reliability. However, we can no longer rely on the honor system either. Even Princeton University had to scrap its honor code and resort to conducting supervised exams for the first time in 133 years.
I am not against using AI writing tools. I even use it to complete mundane tasks like replying to emails and summarizing long texts for bite-sized consumption. And while I don’t agree with using AI for story creation, I don’t mind people doing that, as long as they clearly mark their work as AI-generated.
Using AI-written stories to compete with other authors who have fought their imposter syndrome and poured their emotions into their work is not only wrong but also a deep betrayal of the human vulnerability and experience upon which traditional storytelling is built.
It’s the act of creation that brings the greatest joy when you hit the last period on your story or novel. Using cheap AI stories to compete is nothing but a cash grab, and those authors who engage in this should be banned from any and all future competitions.
As research has shown again and again, humans are increasingly finding it hard to detect AI content, and in blind tests, we even prefer it. Oh, let’s not forget, AI is making us dumb, too. But all is not lost, I think. As Sir Terry Pratchett wrote in Hogfather, “Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.” And I have utmost confidence in our stupidity to overcome any challenges thrown by the AI.