What happens when people use AI to write short stories? Film movies? Compose plays? We don’t have to speculate anymore: We’re watching this unfold today and will most likely have to contend with this sort of practice for the foreseeable future.

Granta is a considered an elite literary publication on par with The Paris Review and The New Yorker, and it’s many a writer’s dream to find their own name etched in its pages. The literary magazine caught flak a couple of weeks ago, however, for running a story that many discerning readers believed to be heavily infused with AI-generated prose. The story is called “The Serpent in the Grove“, written by Jamir Nazir, and not only was it published; it also won the coveted Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

The main flaw in the text is the overuse of mixed metaphors, a common defect in large language model “writing.” Here is the first paragraph or so of the story:

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. People who pass keep to the track and do not look into the bush where the stone rings lie. Ask the oldest in the village and you’ll hear some version of: ‘It had a well there once, and a woman. The grove ain’t forget.’

Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument. It beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan. 

Hums, rasps, shouts. These verbs signify quite different types of sound but are all used to try and evoke a sense of this grove. The examples of this odd use of metaphor abound throughout the story.

While we might worry about readers being so paranoid about AI writing that they make unjust accusations, this instance seems to merit the scrutiny. Vauhini Vara writes in The Atlantic,

What’s so harmful about applying literary judgment to expose writing that sounds machine-made? Maybe an author did use AI. Maybe their consciousness was just so influenced by AI that they started imitating it. In either case, a little public shaming might be warranted.

Don’t Forget the Books

The Granta scandal isn’t isolated. In March of 2026, the horror novel Shy Girl was pulled from publication after the author was suspected of using AI to help her write it. Frank Landymore of Futurism writes,

In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, the Hachette spokeswoman said that both its US and UK imprints conducted a “lengthy investigation in recent weeks” before the decision was made not to publish. 

Ballard, the author, denies personally using AI, claiming that an editor she hired to go over the book when she originally self-published it was responsible for using AI instead.

In a separate essay from earlier this year, Landymore also makes note of the crazy number of AI-generated books overwhelming the self-published book market. Commenting on a fiction writer with a pen name of Coral Hart, he writes,

Across 21 different pen names, Hart says she produced more than 200 romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, which has been drowning in AI slop for years now. None were huge hits on their own, per the NYT, but in all they sold around 50,000 copies, raking in six figures. While being interviewed on Zoom, she finished producing a book in just 45 minutes. Your average human writer doesn’t stand a chance, she says.

The book market is already oversaturated, with millions of new titles published every single year, and AI slop books are only going to make things much more crowded. There is simply too much out there. And if someone can “write” a book in minutes with these new tools, then it’s going to take some real discernment and effort to even figure out what’s real and worth reading.

The backlash against AI-generated writing and art shows how countless people still don’t want automated systems creeping into the world of arts and culture. They’d rather the arts remain distinctly human. Something is clearly lost when a computer and not a personal soul spits out a story or a poem. The task today now might simply be to learn how to appreciate quality creative work and collectively demand that it stems from human intelligence. Such intelligence is, after all, where AI gets its material from and is the only reason why the technology exists in the first place.