What does it mean if AI can write as well as humans?

Last week, the internet was abuzz with allegations that this year's winner of the Commonwealth Foundation prize for Caribbean regional short fiction had been written using artificial intelligence (AI).

- RAHUL MATTHAN

Last week, the internet was abuzz with allegations that this year's winner of the Commonwealth Foundation prize for Caribbean regional short fiction had been written using artificial intelligence (AI). Not only had the winning story, ‘The Serpent in the Grove’, passed through several rounds of internal review before being selected as the winner from over 7,000 submissions, it had also been published in Granta, a literary magazine that has carried work by the likes of Ishiguro, Rushdie and Zadie Smith.

The public response to these revelations has spanned the full range of emotions—from indignation at the author for trying to pass his work off as original to anger with the technology itself for encroaching upon a domain that many believe must always remain the preserve of human wordsmiths. But the more we try to find traces of AI in what we read, the less time we have to understand all that it can do for us. I spent the last month trying to figure out just that.

The immediate consequence of last week's events will be excessive caution. Editors, publishers and juries around the world will run every submission they receive through AI detectors to make doubly sure of the provenance of whatever they select, but since those filtering techniques are themselves probabilistic, there is every likelihood that at least a few pieces of human writing will also get caught in the dragnet.