The literary world isn’t prepared for AI

A noteworthy advance is shaping the AI sector: Tech TechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All Tech AI AIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All AIThe literary world isn’t prepared for AIThree recent scandals say more about the publishing industry than they do about the quality of LLM-generated writing.

Three recent scandals say more about the publishing industry than they do about the quality of LLM-generated writing. by Gaby Del Valle Gaby Del VallePolicy ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All by Gaby Del ValleMay 22, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.

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See our ethics statement. Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Gaby Del Valle Gaby Del VallePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All by Gaby Del Valle is a policy reporter at The Verge covering surveillance, the Department of Homeland Security, and the tech-right.

Since 2012, the British literary magazine Granta has published the regional winners of the annual Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This year, however, there was something off about one of the selections for the prestigious award: It appears to have been written by AI. Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” has many of the hallmarks of LLM-generated prose — mixed metaphors, anaphora, lists of threes.

(I’m aware this, too, is a list of threes, and I promise I wrote this post myself, unassisted, as I write all things. ) I’ll admit I was initially unconvinced by the allegation that Nazir’s story had been generated by AI. I know people are using LLMs to help them write — or to write for them, period — but I’ve been wary of the sort of AI paranoia that has developed among my peers.

Industry Implications

Em dashes are supposedly an AI tell, as are the word “delve” and the aforementioned lists. Short, punchy sentences, too, especially when used to punctuate a succession of longer sentences. But I, a human being, have certainly used all of the above in my writing before.

LLMs, after all, are trained on human writing. They mirror what they’ve been fed. And yet there’s an eerie quality to AI-generated prose.

There’s something off about it, even if you can’t immediately tell what it is. If there are specific AI tells, and I’m using those tells right now, then how do you know I actually wrote this? Qureshi, a former visiting scholar of AI at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, was among the first to point out the suspected use of AI in Nazir’s story.

The development is set to intensify competition in the AI space, experts say.