This year’s Commonwealth short story prize ran into rough weather as it was found out that its winning entry was likely created with heavy use of AI. Whilst many of us routinely use AI to write memos at work and elsewhere, here is Nandini Nair putting the idea of writing in its true context.
“What is writing? At its most fundamental level, it is “a way to communicate meaning across space and time” (as speaketh Claude AI). But at a more philosophical level, writing is a mode of inquiry. It is how we observe and ponder. It is how we cohere human experience into understanding. It is conscious daydreaming.
Just as no two people have identical dreams, no two people’s written work can perfectly plot onto each other’s. And that is why writing is so glorious. It is specific to each one of us.
Those who argue that large language models (LLMs) are like the calculator—it helps us arrive quicker at an answer—see writing as a tool.
Sure, it is a tool, but unlike mathematics, with writing, there is no one correct answer. If we see writing only as a tool, then we overlook the importance of lived experience.
Writing and reading is an act of communion, and for it to be sanctified, we need the facts. Has this author spent hours, days, weeks or months kneading each sentence into meaning? Or has the person fed prompts into a system and relied entirely on an external syntax?”
With reference to the controversy, she says: “Serious long-form fiction and non-fiction is an endurance sport; it is as much about intellect and rigour as it is about persistence. To pass off AI’s work as one’s own is to mock the entire enterprise. Those who use LLMs reach the finish line of the marathon first, but without the pounding chest, the drenched body and the buckling legs. What is the point of running the race at all, one could ask.
The hue and cry over the Commonwealth short story winners is less about quality and more about a breach of faith. The writers lied, took a shortcut and were then caught out.”
So, it is indeed a breach of faith than the use of AI itself as she goes on to say:
“I am not saying that I will never read a book written by an LLM. But what I want is the truth; tell me it has been written by a non-human. We are now starting to see that, for example, the book The AI Ten Commandments: A New Moral Code for Humanity is authored by “Jamie Metzl and GPT-5.” With time, we will see many more such non-human ‘co-authors.’
When it comes to functional writing, business memos and interminable emails, the usefulness of AI is undeniable. Why spend hours on a business brief that Claude can write better and more precisely within seconds? But we must hold journalism and all of literature—fiction and non-fiction—to higher standards.
We read an article, short story or book not to witness how adroitly an author can prompt engineer, but to parse the fruits of toil and attention. I will always prefer a book that an author has taken 10 years to write over a book that was completed in a week by a bot. Toil is vital because it emphasizes slowness, it rewards pain and pause over optimization.
No author writes because it is easy. Rather, it is the hardest thing that they love to do.”
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