Innocent Chizaram Ilo on the Ongoing Dilemma for Readers and Writers
In the early hours of Sunday, May 17th 2026, I stumbled on a tweet by Nigerian literary critic and essayist, Chimezie Chike, accusing Jamir Nazir, the newly minted 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner (Caribbean Region), of winning the coveted prize with a story like this. A little digging into the comments has Chimezie and others positing that Jamir’s story, “The Serpent in the Grove,” was a terrible read, wrought with tedious metaphors, and, most importantly, AI-generated.
The AI accusations were palpable because the “giveaways,” “icks,” and “invitations” were sentence structures and literary devices that I have grown to love as a reader and have, many a time, incorporated in my own writing. There was no room for “what ifs,” no consideration that Large Language Models (LLMs) do not exist in a vacuum and were (and are still) trained using works from unconsenting writers. To see things for myself, I decided to read the story. It was a beautiful story, read a bit overwritten and melodramatic in some points but this was a style of writing I am used to, written by someone Toni Morrison would describe as a person who does language.
Mr. Nazir’s story echoes the voices of Asian and Caribbean literary canons. There are noticeable influences from writers such as Arundhati Roy and Jamaica Kincaid. It has the beautiful strangeness I always look forward to in the stories of previous Asian/Caribbean regional winners of the prize. Sharma Taylor, the Caribbean judge for this year’s prize, also echoes my thoughts in her citation of Mr. Nazir’s story; “polished and confident, with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line.”
Soon, and almost predictably, the conversation about Mr. Nazir’s story has devolved into a cesspool of conspiracy theories about “rules of three,” “metaphors,” and “em dashes,” a couple of screenshots from Pangram ranging from a near perfect AI-generated proof score to strong and moderate AI-signal of different sections of the story, summation of the story as postcolonial garbage, accusations of wokewashing (whatever this means), and writers who have not been so lucky with the prize getting their lick back through jabs, edged on by concurring applause from an already polarized audience.
The regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize were announced on Wednesday, May 13th, 2026 to the usual fanfare and traditional publication of the winning stories by Granta. Now in its fourteenth year, the prize has continued to celebrate literary excellence in the Commonwealth region. Previous winners and shortlistees of the prize include bestselling authors, a Booker finalist, Kirkus, V.S Pritchett, Windham-Campbell Literature prize winners. The prize is very important, especially to unpublished and economically disadvantaged writers because it has no entry fees or being a published writer as an eligibility criteria.
I won the African regional prize in 2020 for my short story “When A Woman Renounces Motherhood.” This makes me privy to the prize’s selection process. The 7,000+ entries are read and evaluated by a team of professional readers who have the task of recommending a longlist of about two hundred short stories to the judging panel. The judging panel, which is usually made up of critically acclaimed writers and literary professionals, further whittles down the entries to a shortlist of twenty-five, the final-five regional winners, and then to the overall winner. There are six judges: the chair and one judge for the five regions. However, the judging and selection process at all stages must be unanimous and collective. The regional judges do not have the autonomy of selecting the shortlistees and winners for their region. Background checks are also a core part of the selection process. The prize administrators request for proof of birth and nationality and an editor is then assigned to the winning writer before the story is published.
The reader’s dilemma is not so different from the writer who now navigates a community agog with a game of Find the Imposter, where everyone is both player and umpire.
So, when the conversation revealed Mr. Nazir’s LinkedIn account containing AI-fanboying posts, his Facebook page littered with supposedly AI-generated poems, and his AI-generated headshot for the prize, I began to question how an institution with an existing structure to combat plagiarism and intellectual theft did not flag the obvious red flags in Mr. Nazir’s entry.
I would admit that, just like this year’s panel of judges, and first-readers, I too missed the obvious red flags in Mr. Nazir’s digital footprint and still think he submitted a beautiful story for the prize. This is because as ChatGPT and its other parasitic LLM brethren continue to gain popularity, I decided to adopt the ostrich method—bury my head in the sand and hope everything goes away, as I had previously done with Bitcoin. The very few times I have joined online conversations about How to detect AI-generated prose, I checked out immediately because what was labeled as AI-generated writing are so often from marginalized writers like myself.
In the wake of Mr. Nasir’s saga, I started reading a couple of the alarmist essays about how AI is perfecting the art of creative writing. The revelations are grim. Over and over again, words and sentence structures that I have grown up reading and writing are flagged as the obvious tics for AI-generated prose. The problem with these tics is that it feeds into the paranoia and mass hysteria where everyone becomes an AI-investigator and a deliberate creative decision by a writer in a story ends up encased with a red-boxed screenshot and labeled as AI-generated. The distrust and chaos is as entertaining as it is excruciating. Nuance is pushed out the door because there is a villain who must be burnt at the stake, a villain who has been scrubbed clean of the context and system that created them in the first place.
It should matter if Mr. Nazir’s story is AI-generated and the prize administrators must take accountability for this lapse in judgement and implement a policy on the use of AI (while it may seem obvious not to use AI tools for a short story contest, the Commonwealth Foundation does not have a statement or clause that imposes restrictions in the use of AI/LLM tools in its submission guidelines and entry rules). But what if, however slim the chances are, the red flags and supposed evidence revealed in Mr. Nazir’s story and digital footprint are purely circumstantial and false—what then becomes of Mr. Nazir’s already marred reputation? How do we go back to looking each other in the eye as creative colleagues? The possibility of this tells us that we must rethink the way we accuse writers of AI-generated prose.
The overarching issue with the Court of Public Opinion on All Matters Pertaining Identifying AI-Generated Prose is that it insists upon itself, upon its infallibility. This is evident in the reliance of AI-powered AI-checkers. This ends up sustaining a vicious cycle where AI models are fed more writing with the well-intentioned goal of identifying a culprit, text it will use to churn out more prompts. Also, the concept of AI-generated fiction is absurd. This arrogation positions AI as creator when it is just a mesh of algorithmic permutations trained to mimic human writing. The writers whose works have been used to train these LLMs are still alive and, lest we forget, still writing. What is their fate? Deconstruct the writing style and craft they have nurtured and perfected for decades? Stop writing entirely? What about young and emerging writers who draw influences from these writers whose works have been used to train LLMs? What is the way forward? These are the unanswered questions that loom each time conversations like this happen on the Internet.
I am pondering the many ways AI-generated prose has and will continue to reshape our collective perception of literature. For readers like myself, we may have to throw naivety out the window and become part of the vigilante watching out for a threshold of “icks” before drawing a verdict. And god forbid we unknowingly stumble on an AI-generated piece and genuinely enjoy reading it. How does one atone for this? Is it even possible to unlike prose after the identity of its non-human is brought to light?
The reader’s dilemma is not so different from the writer who now navigates a community agog with a game of Find the Imposter, where everyone is both player and umpire. Young and emerging writers who have not made a name for themselves, enough to be extended benefit of doubt or quell AI-generated allegations on the spot, will bear the brunt of this new world. We must prepare for scapegoating, allegations, and counter allegations. I also believe that in the bid for writers to make their work more human, AI-checkers (hopefully the human ones) will become the new sensitivity readers who assist writers in earning a coveted human-authored badge? I am also wary about how all of these—the self-doubts and well-intentioned intrusions—will stifle our creative process.
