The literary world is sleepwalking into an AI disaster

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The literary world is sleepwalking into an AI disaster<br>“Her laugh is as bright as zinc” and other bad metaphors

Kelsey Piper<br>May 26, 2026

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Actor Leslie Banks in Cyrano de Bergerac—a centuries-old story about taking credit for words you didn’t write. This photo taken during dress rehearsals for a live television broadcast of Rostand’s play at the Alexandra Palace studios, London, 29th October 1938. (Photo by Reg Speller/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)<br>On May 13, a prestigious literary organization — Commonwealth Foundation — announced the regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. There was just one problem, as people noticed very quickly: Several of the winning stories appear to have been written by AI.<br>There are a lot of unreliable AI detectors out there, but one has strong evidence of efficacy: Pangram. University of Chicago economists studied AI detectors in 2025 and found that Pangram had a 0.005 or lower false positive rate — it was the only tool to satisfy such a strict cap. Another study found Pangram matching the near-perfect accuracy of a panel of human expert AI detectors.<br>Some detectors will falsely flag pre-2020 texts as AI-generated, but Pangram almost never does so. One benefit of Pangram is that it errs on the side of false negatives. That is, Pangram would rather mistakenly assume that text is human when it is actually AI than falsely accuse human-written text of being AI-generated (false positive).<br>And Pangram says that the award-winning short story “The Serpent in the Grove” is AI-written. In fact, once people started looking, Pangram also says that the winning story for the Canada and Europe region — “The Bastion’s Shadow” — is AI-written and that the winning story for the Asia region, “Mehendi Nights,” is substantially AI-written.<br>Share<br>In fact, on further investigation, a 2025 winner is… also substantially AI-written. (Though no pre-2025 winners flag any AI content, which is an encouraging sign of Pangram’s accuracy.)

Source: Pangram Labs<br>There are, let’s say, also some noticeable similarities in the prose style between the winning stories that were flagged for AI use. AI chatbots love metaphors and similes, and they often spit out ones that sound vaguely pleasing but are logically incoherent or ascribe properties to things that don’t make sense.<br>“The Serpent in the Grove” gave us, “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” “The Bastion’s Shadow” says, “She carried it now in her bag, heavy as a charm.” “Mehendi Nights” describes something as “swaying against plaster like a warning bell.”<br>(According to the Commonwealth Foundation, “all shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used.”)<br>Similes that don’t quite work are not the only characteristic tic of AI prose. A year ago, commentators pinned down a bunch of stylistic features of AI “trying to write impressive prose,” and that list of tics has held up well even as AI has advanced.<br>My favorite analysis is from Nostalgebraist’s “Hydrogen Jukeboxes,” which meticulously documented “a narrow, repetitive, immediately recognizable style that doesn’t quite resemble that of any human author I’ve ever read,” particularly its fondness for “conjunctions that combine one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal” with “another thing that is concrete and/or sensory.”<br>He gave examples of AI writing he had encountered: “collect your griefs like stones in your pockets,” “connections between sorrow and the taste of metal,” “its presence a quiet pulse against her thigh.”<br>It’s the same pattern I noticed in “The Bastion’s Shadow’s” “stone had begun to carry the stories it couldn’t release,” or in “The Serpent in the Grove’s” “A fact that felt like a small warm animal in her hands” and “her laugh is bright as zinc.”<br>It’s not bad writing, necessarily — the AI does it because it has been trained that it’s good writing! But it is very distinctive to AI writing.

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I did, while working on this story, read, for comparison, the winners not flagged by Pangram as AI. Perhaps this overwrought style is simply what wins literary contests these days? But having reviewed the regional winners that were not flagged as AI, I don’t think that’s true.<br>The non-flagged winners are indeed metaphor-laden. But here’s the Pacific winner, on skinning a lamb: “She had to lift the head to cut around the underside, and something in the lolling floppiness of it reminded her of Eddie when he was a newborn. It had frightened her at the time, holding this delicate creature and realising how his life was entirely in her hands. She pushed the thought out before it sprouted roots and put her off the task.” This has metaphors, sure, but they’re coherent and non-cliche.<br>Or take the Africa winner, dissecting the advice to “just” leave her husband in “Me and Ma’am”:<br>“When I hear Ma’am say just, it feels like the cotton balls I grab by the handful and...