Looks like that probably AI-generated story that won the Caribbean category of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize last month has won the overall prize, too.
Writer Vincenzo Barney predicted as much in his piece for Unherd shortly after the original controversy around the Caribbean category winner:
And if all of these finalists are real, and their work is their own, their writing operates by the same rules, and is still trash. Of the five finalists — one of whom is the verifiably real Lisa-Anne Julien, who has been published since 2021 and appears animated and otherwise alert and not-computer-generated in videos — the overall winner will be announced on June 30. For my money, I like Nazir’s work the best.
If you’ve ever tried using AI for fiction, you’ll know that it produces text that is often overwritten, with metaphors that sound deep but don’t actually mean anything. Several of the winning story’s passages in the quoted article have this unmistakable shape.
Barney comes to the same diagnosis for the degradation of writing as I did for the degradation of Internet culture: optimization for algorithms.
The writer was not hooking a reader anymore with an anecdotal lede, but hooking Google’s algorithm, which prioritizes algorithmic styles of writing, styles of writing that a computer can understand and parse. We have been reading and writing in this medium for three decades, watching the birth of the one-sentence opening paragraph — a contradiction in terms — in journalism, and the extinction of voice and style across all genres.