Commonwealth Prize AI controversy shows: The writer who took the shortcut, failed the story

Fame, while dazzling, has very little to do with the drudgery of daily practice. In effect, its touch is as mystical and inexplicable as the business of loving and living: It is mundane, it is sublime. To outsource the former is to give up agency upon the latter

A few months ago, I had invited my friend and colleague from Computer Science, Aalok Thakkar, to speak to my graduate students about AI and its limitations in higher research. This was a writing seminar for PhD scholars. Aalok and I — despite coming from very different disciplines and vastly different levels of expertise on the subject — are often in agreement about what indiscriminate AI-use can do in the university. I was, thus, particularly excited for his talk.

Aalok opened with a little game: A series of excerpts were placed side-by-side. The audience had to detect which were AI-generated. My students were pretty darn good at this; I was not (The extracts were short, and AI-writing is apparently more difficult to detect in shorter pieces. The longer a piece, the papering-over begins to crack visibly). I was forced to admit, yet again, that AI writing had been getting better and better while I was going about life. So much so that now we have a controversy of the sort that was unthinkable a few years ago: A short story, one of the winners of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize this year and subsequently published by Granta, has been accused of being written substantially by AI.

That judges of a literary competition might fail to detect AI-writing does not seem surprising to me. Had I not been a teacher of writing in these imperilled times when one has to engage with this issue deeply—and daily — I doubt I’d have even thought about it much. Like many of my generation, class and educational background, I would have simply gone about my own reading and writing life as I always had, at a remove from the afra tafri on the ground. I also doubt my own practices of reading and writing would have changed very much — and without that change, without actively educating myself on the process, I might have been fooled too. After all, the way AI overuses metaphors and stretches every sentence out can be mistaken for a certain kind of overblown style.

To me, ultimately, this controversy seems to be focusing on the wrong end of the stick. Sure, becoming judges to literary competitions will probably now require going through a military-style training programme — but that is, in the end, a minor irritation. There are many kinds of writers in the world, and their lived realities are diverse. In my own writing class, there are brilliant scientists in the making. English is a language they came to late. They use AI-assist to polish their sentences as they write academic papers. How can I refuse to understand their context-specific AI use?

The point of literary fiction, however, is not the communication of a result. A writer uses words to make visible that which is hidden deep within, to give form to what is formless. It is a Hunger Games-type situation. You have to do it yourself — to save yourself (steps include: Delete, retype, lacerate, repeat). The writer who begins a piece is not the writer who finishes the piece. And the pleasure of the process is in the blood and gore involved in this very counter-intuitive-seeming deal. (Of course, writers write fiction for lesser goals too — to win prizes, to become famous. And exactly like students who turn in papers written using AI, the cost, most of all, is to themselves.)

There’s a story I share with my students every semester, drawn from The Magic of Oz, one of the final books of L Frank Baum’s wildly successful Oz series. A prolific inventor, Professor Wobblebug, creates a unique pill that mitigates hunger by providing the nourishment equivalent to a meal comprising soup, fried fish, roast, salad and dessert. The good professor is very put out when his brilliant invention does not catch on in the market. Nobody, it seems, is willing to trade up a meal with a tablet.

The point of literary fiction, in the same way, is the process. Fame, while dazzling, has very little to do with the drudgery of daily practice. In effect, its touch is as mystical and inexplicable as the business of loving and living: It is mundane, it is sublime. To outsource the former is to give up agency over the latter. The writer who took the shortcut, whether detected or not, failed the story they were meant to write. AI can give a hundred clever versions. But in the vastness of the universe, the chink left by the author’s specific lost story does not go unrecorded, even if the writer himself does not register its loss.

Roy is an author and assistant professor of writing at Ashoka University, Haryana