Literary Magazine Faces Questions Over AI Use in Prize-Winning Story

Readers identified patterns associated with AI-generated text in “The Serpent in the Grove,” a story that won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and appeared on Granta’s website. Granta’s publisher Sigrid Rausing stated that the magazine submitted the story to the chatbot Claude.

” The Commonwealth Foundation and Granta released statements that did not confirm or deny AI involvement. Author Jamir Nazir has not commented publicly.

Vara tested the story and prior Commonwealth Prize winners using Pangram, a detection platform. The tool flagged 100 percent of “The Serpent in the Grove” as likely AI-generated. Pangram flagged no stories among winners from 2012 through 2024. Among this year’s other winners, one story received a 100 percent flag and another received an 89 percent flag.

Vara noted that Claude is a general chatbot rather than a specialized detection tool. She also reported that such tools show higher false-positive rates for text by non-native English speakers. Vara described her own experiments with AI for her 2025 book “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,” where she prompted a chatbot to expand on an existing essay and included the results to illustrate limitations.