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Oh, dear. AI shenanigans are once again causing a furor, and we’re going to have to talk about it because I find this latest instance a little too provocative not to.

Here is the thumbnail version I’m sure you’ve heard by now: Readers and some literary critics have raised concerns that one of the five regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize may have been at least partly AI-generated, a suspicion that’s been raised about three of the five award winners, all of whom were published in stalwart literary magazine Granta. (You can read the short story in question here, and more about the hubbub over it here in a gift link.)

And people have Big Feelings about this. Read any of the comments on stories addressing the topic, or this Reddit thread, and you’re going to get an affronted (and sometimes hilarious) earful.

I’ve written about AI and LLMs and how they impact our field—more times than I can believe, actually, for a person who isn’t especially technology-oriented—but this development has me pondering again: What are the ethics behind creatives using AI in their art, especially when it comes to contests and awards?

Let me make my own stance clear at the outset: If indeed some of the submissions and prizewinners in the Commonwealth contest—or any writing competition—used AI to generate part of their stories, I’m bugged by that.

But especially lately I try to articulate not just what I believe, but why. Beyond the big-picture objections to AI involving data centers and water and resource usage, beyond the objection that it’s regurgitating a masticated mashup of other creators’ original work, why is this incident sticking in my craw—and the craws of so many?

What Are Writing Contests Judging?

One of my strongest-held feelings regarding the use of AI in the creative process and product, the conclusion I drew from my last post about it [“Should Writers Use AI?”], is that art is uniquely human, and it’s that quality that gives it its resonance and power for us.

But ponder this hypothetical, as in fact I did: What if you read a piece of writing and you do feel affected and moved by it, but then you discover it was partially or fully AI generated? Would it change your feelings about or experience of it?

I was hashing out these thoughts with friends at the dog park this past weekend, one of whom offered the parallel of learning an artist whose work you’d admired was a pedophile, for example, or a white supremacist. It doesn’t change the art itself or whatever worth you had assigned it, but I know from firsthand experience that it can certainly affect your experience of and reaction to it. There are a number of works I can no longer enjoy in the same way because of unpalatable circumstances regarding their creators.

At the moment AI arguably isn’t that great a writer, but I suspect that won’t always be the case, and there may indeed come a time when its work is indiscernible from human-created efforts. But for me, machine-generated writing takes something away from its effect, feels like a trick or a betrayal of a human connection I may have thought I felt: a moment of communion with a fellow soul on this little speck of a planet we share in a vast unknowable universe trying to make sense of a random world together.

Of course, that may not be everyone’s experience: Separate the artist from the art, some argue. But even keeping that in mind, to me it becomes problematic in the forum of a contest of skill.

Here’s another hypothetical to illustrate that: One of my dog-park friends is a baker. She often brings us professional-quality treats like macarons and multilayered cakes and sublime cupcake creations with unusual flavorings, and we marvel over her talent and skill and creativity.

“But what if I had simply followed someone else’s recipe,” she said, “or made my desserts from a box mix?”

They’d still be every bit as delicious, but if she represented them as her original creations it would feel like a cheat, we all admitted.

Now take that into a competitive environment: If a contest is for a baker’s individual ingenuity and execution, then if they’re judged “the best” on work that is based on rehashing or recycling someone else’s creation does it feel fair or honest for them to win?

I know from my own baking that following a recipe successfully is still a skill, but it’s a different one. If we are judging on a creator’s own efforts, that’s one kind of contest, but if we’re adding in how well they perform with artificial or outside assistance, that’s a different playing field.

Here’s the problem: There are tests to determine whether an athlete has been dosing with something that may give them an artificial boost, but at the moment we don’t have any reliable way of proving whether writing has been AI-generated in full or in part; we’re basically on the honor system. There’s a reason sports organizations utilize these tests; unfortunately you can’t always rely on people to fully honestly self-report.

As with the “Enhanced Games” this past weekend in Las Vegas, a sports competition where use of performance-enhancing drugs is allowed, if incorporating AI or any other adjuncts to a human’s own efforts is openly the premise of a competition, sure, go nuts.

But if it’s not, if what’s being judged is an individual human’s ability—as with the Olympics, where doping will get you disqualified—then that doesn’t quite seem fair, does it?

What Makes Writing “the Best”?

There’s one last argument I’ve heard on the devil’s-advocate side regarding AI use in competitions like this: If something is the best then it’s the best, and it should be recognized as such regardless of its provenance.

And that’s probably the bottom line here: that the Commonwealth Foundation is fully at liberty to award their prize to whomever they wish, whichever short stories they presumably have deemed “the best.”

But “best,” as I say often in my work and my teaching, is entirely subjective, by its nature a judgment dependent on the tastes and aesthetic and mood and values and experience of every person who executes anything, creative or otherwise, and every person who assesses it.

The short story behind all the uproar in the Commonwealth contest is not one I probably would have offered an award to personally. In my subjective opinion, as an editor and as a reader, I find it a bit overwritten, distractingly heavy on metaphor (some quite opaque to my mind: “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men”), repetitive in places, self-consciously stylistic.

But I am admittedly not the target audience, as neither short stories nor “high literary” fiction are my jam. I don’t know that I would have chosen this out of the nearly 8,000 entries submitted, based on the percentage of stories I work on and read that I have personally found more effective and enjoyable than this piece.

We don’t know if these prizewinners used AI or not. But if any of them did, and if I were one of those nearly 8,000 authors who entered my work believing that the judgments would be based solely on human effort and efficacy, I might feel a bit misled and betrayed. As a reader I might feel duped.

The problem is we can’t know. And I wonder what that does to our perception of creativity and creators and art. What that does to us as creators.

The Effort of Art

My husband and I are avid fans of the HBO Max show Hacks, and in a recent episode Jean Smart’s comedian character, Deborah Vance, is approached by a tech billionaire who wants to use her material to build his AI engine to help laypeople write funnier speeches, toasts, etc. Despite the fervent objections of her writing partner, Ava (played by Hannah Einbender), Smart is all set to sign.

But then she has this exchange with the billionaire, Graham Sweeney (played by Alex Moffat), after he tells her she is probably going to want to use his engine even for writing her own material:

Deborah: No, I don’t think so.
Sweeney: Mm, yes, you will, ’cause everyone’s gonna be using it. So, if you want to keep up with the other comedians, you’re gonna have to.
Deborah: But I want to write the jokes. I like doing the work.
Sweeney: So you’re telling me that if you got stuck on a punch line and you had a tool at your disposal to help you with that, you wouldn’t use it?
Deborah: Absolutely not. There’s no shortcut.
Sweeney: Yeah, but here’s the thing: There is. I created it. You’re welcome.
Deborah: Well, okay, fine. Yes, there is. But using that shortcut then makes it something else. It makes it not art.
Sweeney: Um, I’m sorry, but your joke about laser hair removal is art?
Deborah: Okay, you’re right. It’s pretentious to call it art. But that “laser hair removal” joke is something I arrived at after trying a million other versions. Every time that joke didn’t work, not only did I make it better, but it made me a comedian. Because to become one you have to do it and fail and do it and fail over and over and over until you figure out who you are.

What makes an artist an artist is the process of creating their art—the hard way, through trial and error, learning and honing, trying and failing, and trying again, and in the course of doing that, you get good. You master your craft.

This post, like all my blog posts, is 100 percent human-generated. It’s the result of my spending quite a bit of time pondering this contest incident, mulling over why it’s causing such an uproar, what I think art is, how I feel about the whole thing, talking it over with friends and synthesizing all of that and formulating my thoughts. I wrote it—and then almost completely rewrote it—over several days, letting the ideas simmer and stew, trying with each revision to more clearly express what I wanted to say.

That whole process took hours and a good portion of my brain space and mental energy, and I got a little lost in it for much of that time. It changed me a little bit: I grew from it, as a person and as a writer, as I do with everything I write. All of that is so much of what I love about doing it.

And as Deborah Vance says, there’s no shortcut for that.

Authors, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue—and AI use in creativity in general. What’s your opinion of this story, and what aspects of this situation affect the way you think about it? If you feel writing and other art—in contests or otherwise—should be human-created, what’s to be done about the fact that it’s increasingly challenging to determine with any certainty whether or not a piece of art is AI generated in full or in part?

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