The Serpent in the Grove

I asked Grok to give me some examples of false positives generated by Pangram. Sillily, it gave me Shy Girl, even though Mia Barrow has already said that a friend may have "edited" it with AI. But in some ways, it's even more fascinating that another example it gave me was The Serpent in the Grove.

This story was the winning entry for the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. It's available to read for free on Granta.com, so I ran the first thousand words of it through Pangram. They came back as 100% AI-generated, with high confidence.

Then I actually chose to read them, and I'm almost sorry I did. This is very purple prose — choked with metaphors, including ones that seem nonsensical:

• "Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it."
• "She had the kind of walking that made benches become men."
• "The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink." (Not in the first thousand words but honorably mentioned by Marlon James on Facebook.)

But y'know what? This reminds me of something that came up in my study of English at the University of Sydney. A lecturer said that since such-and-such a poet had written such-and-such a poem, the entire worldview had changed, so we couldn't appreciate it anymore. So, he would not seek to unlock the hidden meaning in the poem but rather see how we could open up the poem for meanings for ourselves. 

And don't we do that all the time when we read anything literary or poetic? I mean, I actively tried to do that when I read the first two sentences above. All I could make of the first sentence was that the name ("Zoongie") was meant to be some kind of onomatopoeia of rain falling. Not that that is what rain sounds like at all. But maybe if the rain were especially vigorous on a corrugated iron roof when it decided to keep that shape...?

I also thought about the kind of walking that would turn benches into men. To me, it would be the kind of walking that would attract the men to the benches to look at the woman walking past. So many men would gather onto those benches, in fact, that you could not see the benches for the men. Hence, the walking 'turned the benches into men'. I don't regard that as being as far-fetched as the rain interpretation, but I agree that it's reaching. Still, I like it much more than Jamir Nazir's explanation that it is "magical realism" but that it "exists only in her imagination" — which is not magical realism at all.

It also reminds me of the way that they tested your programming abilities when you applied for a job. They'd get you to type a coding task into a window that recorded all your keystrokes. They could play back exactly what you did from start to finish as you wrote the code. But even this was not enough, because you might have just gotten a friend to code it for you instead. So, during the interview, they would also show you your code and get you to talk about it. 

I can only assume that that worked. I mean, I could always talk about my own code because — eeaarrhhh! — I wrote it. But I once read on Quora about a guy who tried to get a job applicant to discuss the code he submitted in his application. The applicant just looked nervous and eventually admitted that he had gotten a friend to write the code himself — naughty, naughty. 

So, y'know, maybe that's the answer here. I think it would be hilarious if we started insisting that people compose their stories directly into a keystroke recorder. But I'm starting to think it would be a good idea to interview the authors and get them to talk about their own work. 

In that regard, Nazir made two good points to the Times of India. First, the Commonwealth asked him to submit drafts and other material pertaining to his work to prove his humanity. These weren't part of the competition rules, but he chose to comply because he didn't want to jeopardise his position. So, they were basing their judgement partially on evidence that the work was his own.

Second, he says, "Ask an AI to write a prize-winning story on its own and see what it produces". I know this sort of thing firsthand, in the experience of both me and people I know. If you tell an AI to write a story, it'll write a story, and it'll be a piece of crap — certainly nothing that will win an award. This story won the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Considerable human intellectual effort and authorship must have been invested into that story for that to happen!

That doesn't mean that the text wasn't AI-generated. But it does mean that a sophisticated workflow must have been used to produce it if it were. I do not believe that any AI today would have come up with The Serpent in the Grove if you just told it to write a story. Even if it were directed to involve the Indo-Caribbean experience.