Like sunrise over a sink
It appears that the winner of a short story prize was generated with AI. But how was it selected?
So I want to be a bit careful about this, because a false positive would be harmful, but it certainly looks like the short story that won the Commonwealth Fund Short Story Prize was generated with AI.
A lot has been said of the writing, which includes sentences like:
“She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.”
And:
“The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.”
The author has no digital footprint except for an AI-shilling LinkedIn account. While he is a verified real person, his author photo has very clearly also been AI-generated.
Here’s the thing I haven’t seen anyone mention yet: we know that when AI is used in hiring, it preferences AI-generated resumés. And not by a small amount:
“The preference rate for models evaluating their own outputs over human-written alternatives reached a staggering 67% to 82% across major commercial and open-source systems.”
There were well over seven thousand submissions for the short story prize. Is it really outside of the realm of possibilities that the prize itself used AI to sift through them?
I’m not saying any of this is definitely what actually happened, but it certainly makes for an interesting Turing test — and it’s worth making note of this moment as a marker as AI continues to ingrain itself culturally.
