u/jckalman

See: https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1tg726k/commonwealth_short_story_prize_awards_aigenerated for context and the various followup threads:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1thab8t/pretty_sure_another_commonwealth_short_story/

https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1thpwwy/even_commonwealth_short_story_prizes_asian_region/

https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1thvvkw/grantas_response_to_commonwealth_ai_allegations/

We've been deleting related posts because I think some people are tired/saddened by it but it's obviously an important and alarming issue so we're migrating discussion of it here for now.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1tg726k/commonwealth_short_story_prize_awards_aigenerated/ for context

> For more than ten years Granta has published the winners of the Commonwealth Prize on our website. Granta editors have no control over the selection of the Commonwealth Prize stories, and nor are they involved in choosing the jury. This year, there has been speculation that Jamir Nazir’s winning story, ‘The Serpent in the Grove’, may have been at least partially AI-generated.

> We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was AI-generated. The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’. It ended, however, on a cautious note:

> ‘The strongest evidence against pure AI authorship is the small number of passages that don’t fit the pattern – particularly the Zoongie morning-greeting and the agricultural paragraph about the acre. Those passages carry the kind of off-shape specificity that models still struggle to produce unprompted. If the story has a human core, it is concentrated there, and the AI has been used to elaborate around it . . .’

> The intention of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is to find writers from around the Commonwealth and bring them to global attention. It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism – we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know. There is, however, a certain irony in the fact that beyond human hunches AI itself is the most efficient tool we have for revealing what is AI generated. But the AI-generated critique of these Commonwealth writers – more than one has been accused of basing their story on AI material – may conceivably itself reflect AI bias. Time will tell. The suggestion that writers have submitted material not authentically their own is a charge we take seriously, but until the Commonwealth Foundation comes to a definite conclusion, we will keep these stories on our website.

https://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Rausing-Statement.pdf

> I’m not an artist or a critic, or a hybrid of the two, but something odder and less, a reader.

• Letter from Harold Bloom to A. R. Ammons, August 21, 1971

Bloom was something of a holy monster and I know a lot of people here don’t have the patience for him. Others overly revere him. For either camp, these letters go a long way to ground him and explain who he was.

It’s fairly short and catalogued by correspondent: Alvin Feinman, Northrop Frye, John Hollander, A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Henri Cole, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Mostly poets and, accordingly, most of the letters concern poetry. Almost all were written in the 1970s when Bloom was going through an extended depressive phase and developing his influence theory. If you ever felt at loose ends trying to understand The Anxiety of Influence or its various successors, he actually lays it out quite plainly in these letters.

Overall, it’s a touching posthumous coda. He comes off gentle and conscientious with very little of the venom and polemic he was notorious for. A lot of critics dismissed him as being useless to their field and he readily admits that they’re right to. He wasn’t a critic. He was a shaman, canon-eer, and Romantic.