The possibility that the prize-winning story was not written by AI is worse.
An AI brouhaha is brewing in literary quarters. A short story by a Trinidadian writer, as Novi Zhukovsky explains in the Free Press, won the prestigious Commonwealth Prize and was subsequently published in the highbrow literary journal Granta. A hue and AI cry followed, as readers claimed to have detected the telltale signs of AI-generated prose. I myself am not well versed in AI tics and turns of phrase, but the argument that “The Serpent in the Grove” does not appear to have issued from an individual, and immediate, human mind seems plausible.
It would indeed be a scandal if the prize jury mistook slop for the real deal. But I see another scandal here: The prize-winning story, assumed by the judges who selected it to have been crafted by a human writer, is terribly written.
Never mind what the story is about, and allow me to focus on the writing itself. Its sentence structures are monotonously subject-verb, subject-verb, subject-verb. Its metaphors and similes commit the cardinal sins of imprecision and straining for effect. When not downright outlandish or nonsensical, the descriptions are hackneyed.
The opening: “They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound — as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.” If it’s a “clean rasp,” it’s not a “hum.” If it’s the hum of a grove, it’s not the sound of “the earth.”
And then:
“Sun . . . beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan.” Which is it — is the roof talking or moaning? And what would a wet moan be?
“Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission.” What?
“Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all.” Rain in teeth?
“Outside, little Puttie — three years old, sun-dark, bright-eyed . . .” Lazy, cutesy description.
“Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. [?] Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. [Oh come on.] Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. [The coins did what?] One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.” The future is, by definition, unknowable; to say it’s written in invisible ink is no clever metaphor but rather just a prettified statement of the obvious.
“She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Seriously — what?!
“Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture, she had a laugh . . .” I have yet to meet women, big or small, who do apologize to furniture.
“She let the nurse make the necessary notes in a ledger whitened by many small tragedies.” If a nurse has made many notations of tragedies on a ledger, isn’t it blackened rather than whitened?
The last sentence (before the prose gives way inexplicably to some lines of verse): “In the hot hush, the grove held its breath and released it — small and entire, like a last stitch drawn through a wound that had finally decided to close.” Wounds are stitched up because they won’t close. If the metaphorical wound is closing, it doesn’t require stitches. As for “small and entire,” the effect would be the same — that is, the effect would still be null — had the pairing been “large and entire,” “small and partial,” or for that matter “humming and dancing,” “blue and vague,” “sharp and intense,” etc. etc.
Fully believing that they were reading the work of a fleshly author, the literary judges deemed the story “beautifully told,” its prose “precise yet richly evocative.” It hardly even matters whether they were fooled by AI.