Is it human-written or an AI product? How often does this question cross our minds nowadays when we stumble upon a well-composed, meticulously punctuated, flawless piece? A prestigious literary award-winning story is at the centre of a furore just because of this.
A few repetitive patterns in phrasing sentences and the verdict of an AI detection online tool have triggered a huge hue and cry over the possibility of the story having been written, not by a human, but by artificial intelligence (AI), The Guardian reported.
The foundation that administered the award, and Granta, the magazine that published the short story, said they did consider the allegations but could not come to any conclusion on whether they were true.
Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta, said: “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”
“We’ve taken stock of the comments and tried to be very systematic in our understanding of some of the perspectives and tried to look at ourselves internally to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough,” Razmi Farook, director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, told The New York Times. “We’re confident in the rigor of our process, but we’re conscious that this is an evolving technological environment.”
‘The Serpent in the Grove’, by 61-year-old Trinidadian author Jamir Nazir, was named the winning entry for the Commonwealth short story prize in the Caribbean on Saturday. Soon after Granta magazine published it, online commentators, along with a few literary critics, jumped in to criticise it, calling it “AI-generated”.
According to The Guardian, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Ethan Mollick, called it “a Turing test of sorts” and said, “100% AI generated story just won the Commonwealth prize for the Caribbean region.” To back up his claims, he cited Pangram, an AI detector, which said the work was AI-generated, however, also adding, “Come on, if you know you know.”
What were the syntactical tics online forums pointed out?
According to NYT, the critics pointed at excessive use of metaphors and similes; nonsensical figurative expressions; and negative parallelism, more commonly known as the “not X, but Y” construction.
The other opinion
Some of the critics, however, said that the AI detectors often make mistakes, especially while assessing creative writings that use constructions unusual to what they have been trained on.
— with inputs from The Guardian and The New York Times
