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How AI is poisoning well of literary prizes, publishing
A signage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seen at the stand of Xiaomi during the 2018 China Mobile Global Partner Conference in Guangzhou city, south China's Guangdong province, 7 December 2018.
Early this week, the prominent literary magazine Granta – that 20 years ago published Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write About Africa (and catapulted him to worldwide fame) – said it will no longer be publishing the winning entries of one of the best-known literary competitions, the annual Commonwealth short story prizes; that has often brought unknown writers to prominence.
In its statement, Granta said: “The 2026 selection of the regional winners of the Commonwealth prize caused a great deal of controversy, based on the speculation that one or more of the stories may have been at least partially AI-generated, accusations that were strongly rejected by the authors. But for the sake of our own editorial integrity, the Granta Trust board has now taken the decision that we will no longer engage in external publishing partnerships. We wish our former partner, the Commonwealth Foundation, all the best in its work.”
Anyone who has ever been fired knows the meaning of “we wish (you) all the best in (your) work/ future endeavours” is just a euphemism for ‘sod off’ or ‘get lost …’
And Caribbean writer Jamir Nazir’s winning story, The Serpent in the Grove’really turned out to be the snake that sent the Granta/Commonwealth partnership to the grave, as lots of literary critics, including Yours Truly, began to notice several obvious giveaways of AI-writing in the story structure/sentences …
“Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument” and “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men” are two of the slips oft quoted from the story – like accidentally having a wedding ring slip and fall at the scene of a bloody murder.
Fiction skills
In an interview with another newspaper a month ago, Nazir’s fiction skills were in full display as he told The Observer: “My writing process is unusual. It is conducted entirely on an Android phone. This is a necessity driven by chronic health conditions, which make sustained, desk-bound typing physically impossible. That is why I rely on speech-to-text to do my writing, followed by minimal keyboard editing, along with the same process of speech-to-text. I have used this in my professional life and also to produce my story for the Commonwealth competition.”
In short, the stinky fish that Jamir was selling to sisi jamii is that he is an oral storyteller who tells complex tales wholly complete into his (tele) phone that then transcribes them, but like a dead town suspect at dawn telling a traffic cop that he is a total teetotaler, even the Granta publisher and philanthropist Sigrid Rausing wasn’t buying the tall tale.
In response to the uproar and outrage over the story, Sigrid simply said: “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.”
Then threw out the Commonwealth baby with the dirty, serpentine bath water!
Earlier this year, ‘writer Mia Ballard’s “femgore” horror novel Shy Girl was pulled from British bookstores and its planned launch by Hachette Publishers axed in America, pardon the pun, after it was found to be 80 per cent AI-generated.
Mia Ballard, of course, denied using AI to write Shy Girl, telling the New York Times that “an acquaintance I hired to edit a self-published version of the novel had used it (AI).” She has since been shy about saying which acquaintance this was, leading many to figure out that the ‘friend’ may be a figment of imagination.
Last month at the Africa Forward (Lit) Festival at the Alliance Francaise, which was organised by the publishing company eKitabu, the writer Betty Kilonzo was in conversation with lawyer Karimi Njagi and an I.T. guru on the subject of Artificial Intelligence and authorship in 2026, with a broad range of relevant topics at hand.
Is AI a collaborator, competitor, or just a tool and what remains uniquely human in storytelling? Who owns AI-generated content, and what are the legal implications for publishers and playwrights? Can AI replicate a writer’s unique voice, and what are the risks of homogenised storytelling in this day and AI-age?
Betty Kilonzo, a Gen Z author, argued for AI as a tool for brainstorming, drafting and editing work, and said one must know where to draw the line with creativity.
“If you use AI as your co-author in a book,” Betty says, “then you are no writer.”
Betty Kilonzo does admit to having used AI to expound on the meaning of her poems in her book Jerusalema, and then there is her current hot book, “The House Help Manual that is a hotcake after the CS of Labour Alfred Mutua recently set a floor plan on how much ‘domestic managers’ ought to be paid.
Kilonzo’s latest book does display the results of her mastery of AI in research and topic layout, albeit with a few of the hidden biases of some African domestic misrepresentation in an otherwise solid narration of the worker/servant bond.
AI is already changing books, scripts, journalism, and digital content, including on Amazon where there is a steady deluge of AI-generated books, not to mention a flood in Kenya by self-printing ‘writers’ with titles like ‘How to Raise a Boy …’
Will this democratization of narration lead to literary AI-slop soon in bookstores?
And can AI evoke emotion, memory, and lived experience, which is what makes a human story truly resonate? All these questions were tackled at the May festival.
Already, our bookshops are filled with generic, formulaic books, especially in the “motivational” sector, and so what if they are generated by AI or by humans?
It is a question that has recently come to vex eKitabu CEO Will Clurman, who told us at the National Essay competition they were recently launching from Starehe Boys Center that being human is a ‘problematic, messy thing,’ and that writers’ work is to work through all that, and reflect society back to us “as David Mailu does in his books like After 4.30,” and which was on theatrical display at Alliance Francaise.
“AI pushes people into a mundane monoculture and can never truly generate the diversity of quirks that our human mind can,” Will Clurman said.
Other than originality, is it really smart to let generative large language models shape the future of our culture, or Artificial Intelligence replace our Original Intelligence (O.I)?
And if AI takes up all the minor writing jobs and opportunities, then emerging authors are deskilled before they get the chance to create any significant works.
This is something that seasoned magazine editor Phyllis Nyambura has seen, saying, “a lot of younger writers are rushing in smooth, bland stories that are clearly AI-generated, which means they have absolutely no hook for readers.”
In an exercise with a Grade 10 learner, Nzula*, she did a paragraph on a burning dorm, after which she got AI to generate one, now that students have this access:
“Looking through the thick smoke that had filled the burning dorm room and was swirling out through the now open door, Mbeti caught a glimpse of Laylay – the most beautiful, popular and most loaded lass in the school – but who was now lying on the floor, trying to crawl out, but clearly hurt from being run over in the stampede. When it came to survival, it was clearly every girl for herself! “Saidia!” Laylay cried plaintively, lifting her right hand like a prayer towards Mbeti – and the next minute, Mbeti was in the burning dorm room, weaving her way towards Laylay through burning mattresses that were making wet sizzling sounds as sponge melted …”
“The acrid smell of burning plastic woke Maya just seconds before the blaring fire alarm pierced the dormitory air. Thick, black smoke rolled across the ceiling, trapping the heat and plunging the hallway into a suffocating darkness. Heart pounding against her ribs, she dropped to her knees, coughing violently as orange flames licked at the wood of her bedroom door. With her pulse racing and the roar of the fire growing louder, she gripped her wet towel tight, locked eyes with her terrified roommate, and crawled toward the only window left open to the cool night air.”
Human sensitivity
The latter is the AI-paragraph, competent enough, and laden with piled-up cliché-phrases.
Reading a lot of books is the best way for students to hardwire their literary skills!
At the 2023 ‘AI and the future of Art’ literary festival in China, this writer listened to Italian lecturer Flamini Cruciani paint a flaming picture in the crucible of her presentation, warning that the progressive hybridisation between human, nature and technology seriously threatens our identity as a subject: “From the time Prometheus stole technical expertise from Athena, AI has been a reality. In recent years, this excess of delegation and delocalisation has increasingly taken on the dimensions of an overall technical planning of the qualities and performances of our human sensitivity.”
In his poem ‘Dreams and Waking,’ the Chair of the Shanghai Arts Council Zhao Lihong has excellent anti-A.I. lines like “how can you make me believe your wild predictions, you cannot even predict my choice in the next minute to come/ how can you understand my silence, even if you manipulate and spread the world’s noise and clamor/ I am a unique human body, a unique system of emotions and thoughts ... You are a robot with a cold face/ even if you become a worm and burrow into my brain!”
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka was more succinct in his assessment of the then looming threat: “There is nothing like Artificial Intelligence,” said the lion of African literature. “Just a lot of S.I., surrogate intelligence, causing a lot of fuss in farce.”
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Mochama’s book ‘How to be an MCA in 2027’ is coming out soon from Mvua Press.
