LLMs Are Revealing How Low the Bar Is (And Lowering It Even Further)

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LLMs Are Revealing How Low the Bar Is (And Lowering It Even Further)<br>Quick thoughts on the Granta AI scandal and a bunch of other recent AI scandals

Lincoln Michel<br>May 19, 2026

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The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)<br>For all of the truckloads of money and advanced technology behind LLMs, their primary achievement so far may be in revealing how low the bar is in seemingly every field. The various LLM/AI scandals this week are good evidence of that. Let me do a little recap.<br>A (Likely) AI Slop Story Wins a Literary Award

If you subscribe to this newsletter, then you likely already know the big literary one: Granta magazine published a story that is seemingly AI-generated from an author with a seemingly AI-generated author photo whose social media profiles are full of AI hype. The story “The Serpent in the Grove,” attributed to Jamir Nazir, was on of the regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize selected by the Commonwealth Foundation. (Granta has responded by saying they asked the LLM Claude whether the story was written by AI—Claude said “almost certainly” involved AI—and that they were keeping the story online until Commonwealth Foundation finished its investigation.)<br>I’m inclined to believe the story is AI-generated because it is filled with the sort of literally nonsensical metaphors that LLMs often produce. It reads quite similarly to the viral OpenAI metafiction story. But it’s also true that humans also write nonsense prose full of incoherent metaphors.<br>The real question is perhaps not how an AI story could slip past judges but how a story this poorly written could win an award for its “lyrical precision.”

MFA vs. LLM: Is OpenAI's Metafiction Short Story Actually "Good"?<br>Lincoln Michel<br>March 17, 2025

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It’s easy to make fun of the word salad sentences in this story and, well, I’m going to. We might as well have a few laughs while the slop flood drowns us. The story has many other issues, from incoherent narrative to language that’s inaccurate for the setting, but I’ll focus on the alleged “lyrical precision” that impressed the judges:<br>If you ask him, he shrugs the way men shrug when feeling places a hand on the neck and says be still.

Classic kind of shrug. I’m always shrugging when feeling grabs my neck and says “be still!” Which feeling? Who knows? Any of them, I guess.<br>In the hot hush, the grove held its breath and released it – small and entire, like a last stitch drawn through a wound that had finally decided to close.

This is seemingly the emotional climax of the story (to the degree it even is a “story”), and honestly one of the most confused sentences I’ve ever read. How many metaphors are mixed here? The grove of trees releases breath like a last stitch through a wound that is still being stitched even though it “decided” to close itself. Got it.<br>They called her Zoongie. 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.

Ladies, you may be sexy, but are you sexy enough to give benches boners? And is your name rain in a shape?<br>You can read the whole thing if you enjoy this kind of prose. Sadly, I must admit many do. When I wrote about the OpenAI story’s sentences not carrying any meaning, I experienced some pushback from readers who said, basically, “who cares if sentences mean anything?” They admitted the metaphors were mixed, the images made no sense, and the sentences were unintelligible. They just didn’t care. Obviously, the judges of this prize didn’t care either.

Yes, Metaphors Should Actually Make Sense<br>Lincoln Michel<br>May 27, 2023

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If a story this poorly written can win an award, the issue isn’t AI. Again, humans write word goop too. The issue is a lack of standards. Not just in literary publishing, as I’ve seen some try to claim. Remember the recent Shy Girl scandal was about a self-published book that was repackaged by a big publisher as commercial genre fiction.<br>One aspect of Shy Girls that has stuck with me is the defense from author Mia Ballard. Ballard claimed she hired an acquaintance to edit her book who likely used AI. She noticed the editor “changed a lot of the wording” but said she didn’t have time to read through the book and see what edits were made before publishing it. (Apparently, she didn’t have any time to read her own book in the many months between self-publishing it and republishing it with Hachette either). Put aside the question of AI, as well as whether this mysterious acquaintance exists: Ballard’s defense is she blindly accepted extensive edits without even reading them! And plenty of people find this defense acceptable.<br>How low are the standards that “I couldn’t be bothered to read the novel I put my name on” is a defense at all? That should be a scandal in itself.<br>Here’s another publishing AI scandal in the same...