{"text":[[{"start":5.65,"text":"Is The Serpent in the Grove, one of the five regional winners of this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize, generated by AI? The story’s author, Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir, has a limited online presence and the work, some readers feel, bears the hallmarks of AI writing. The literary magazine Granta, which does not judge the prize but publishes all five winning entries, is reported to have submitted the short story to Anthropic’s Claude.ai, which concluded, in the words of the magazine’s publisher Sigrid Rausing, “that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’”. Nazir denies that the text was written by AI, questions the accuracy of so-called AI detectors, and writes that the story was inspired by memories from his childhood."}],[{"start":52.3,"text":"When reading the story, I found myself grappling with unwanted déjà vu. It did not remind me of when I ask ChatGPT to produce a polite bit of correspondence, or a firm complaint on my behalf. No, instead it reminded me of when, as a teenager, I discovered the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and tried, badly, to emulate their tone in my own writing. Smart-talking characters might have had “a tongue that could make concrete cry”, while a private detective (there was, of course, a detective) observed of a woman that “she spoke to the part of my family tree that rode horses out on the steppes of Eurasia”. I was not a prodigy. "}],[{"start":92.6,"text":"In Nazir’s story, which is centred around a struggling farmer in rural Trinidad and Tobago, we are told a woman “moved quiet as if sound were taxed”. Another has “the kind of walking that made benches become men”. A third, and this is my favourite, is “big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture”. I have to be honest, none of the women in my life have ever apologised to furniture, and as such I am uncertain what size of woman we are talking about here. The lowest point in the text, though, was surely the following sentence: “shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesn’t rinse”. A sentence that gave me an insight into what it must be like to experience a stroke, if nothing else."}],[{"start":136.05,"text":"Of course, it is true that generative AI often bears an uncanny resemblance to an obnoxious teenager wrongly convinced of their own writing ability. (Or, at least, to my work as an obnoxious teenager.) But as I read The Serpent in the Grove, my concern wasn’t “did a human really write this?” but “did a human really judge this?” "}],[{"start":155.70000000000002,"text":"Can a short story containing such nonsensical phrases really be the best entry this year from the whole of the Caribbean region? Unless the other entries were instruction manuals or full-length novels, I find that hard to understand, but having judged one or two literary prizes myself, I also know that all manner of strange tastes can be found on a judging panel. "}],[{"start":175.95000000000002,"text":"My point here is that the question “is The Serpent in the Grove written by AI?” is a less important question than “do our human intelligences think it is any good or not?” Does it inspire joy or sorrow in the reader? (And I don’t mean the type of joy or sorrow that comes with trying to imagine the precise girth of a woman who never shows contrition towards her garden chair.) "}],[{"start":197.65,"text":"It’s not that I don’t care if my favourite authors are replaced by AI. What I enjoy about the work of Zadie Smith or Madeleine Thien isn’t just that I find the writing beautiful, but that I get, however loosely, the sense of a living author whose work and focus is changing as they go through life. It’s that the most important thing I am doing when reading is exercising my own judgment and my own imagination. The Serpent in the Grove is a failure because it made me laugh, and not with the intention of being humorous. "}],[{"start":229.25,"text":"While I cannot imagine a more hellish way to attempt to create art than to sit at a computer finessing prompts and editing sentences piece by piece until eventually, a great novel emerges, I don’t think that the final product of such a process is inevitably “not art”. But passing judgment on whether it is art or not is a task that we, as readers, should never outsource to anyone (or anything). "}],[{"start":253.95,"text":"There are lessons here that go beyond what we read. AI can already do many tasks for us. But the purpose of that ought to be to free up our time for more rewarding tasks, to sharpen our judgment, not to let it fall into disuse. We should be much more alarmed by the fact that Granta’s publishers decided to use Claude to check whether the story was written using AI instead of using their own, human judgment, than by the idea that Claude might one day write a novel. "}],[{"start":282.5,"text":"Making judgments is part of being human, whether that judgment is over an important ethical question, or trying to imagine what size person never apologises to furniture. "}],[{"start":299.65,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780154271_7422.mp3"}