Snapshot · Modern Wisdom
A Commonwealth Short Story Prize-winning story appears to have been AI-generated, with the editor's response described as a shrug, raising questions about AI's role in literary awards.
Where this was said
At 12:21 · chapter starts 7:41
Chris walks through a detailed analysis of a suspicious Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner published in Granta magazine — a story a computer scientist found to be 'almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.' [1] — Chris Williamson "A Commonwealth Short Story Prize-winning story was almost certainly AI-generated. The editor responded with a shrug. The phrases in the win…" 07:41 Specific phrases in the story, such as 'the patience of a reptile,' trace back to Naruto fan fiction, while other lines appear lifted from random horror blogs. The editor responded with a shrug. Chris's structural argument is sharp: LLMs don't simply learn from the best writing; they absorb whatever the internet has most of, and the internet has vastly more bad writing than good. He analogises it to a robot learning football by watching every human on Earth play — most of whom are terrible. George notes the coding vs. writing capability gap, suggesting that objective feedback loops (code either works or it doesn't) make coding easier to train toward quality than subjective literary taste.
A Commonwealth Short Story Prize-winning story was almost certainly AI-generated. The editor responded with a shrug. The phrases in the winning story trace back to Naruto fan fiction and random horror blogs — because that's what LLMs are really made of.
LLMs produce clunky writing because the internet contains far more bad writing than good writing. A prize-winning AI-generated story was traced back to Naruto fan fiction pages and random horror blogs — because that's what constitutes the bulk of the training data, not Moby Dick.
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