Somehow, Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” slithered past 7,805 other entries for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2026 and became a regional winner. Sharma Taylor, who selected it as the best story from the Caribbean, described its language as “sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy.” Nazir’s story, however, has been called into question precisely for its language, which—some readers argue—betrays the markings of an AI-generated piece.
Ethan Mollick, a professor at Wharton and author of Co-Intelligence, ran the story through Pangram. The AI detector found “The Serpent” to have been composed completely by a Large Language Model. Mollick posted on Bluesky, “In a Turing Test of sorts, it looks like a 100 percent AI generated story just won the Commonwealth Prize for the Caribbean region.”
Now the Commonwealth Foundation is promising “a thorough, transparent review of the selection process.” Both the Foundation and Granta, which published the story, have acknowledged that the accusations may not be unfounded. Both have also, I think mistakenly, made the situation about AI, defending the selection process and expressing doubts about the reliability of AI detectors.