EXCLUSIVE: Story award rejects claim winner used AI, despite mounting evidence

Commonwealth Foundation says it believes author's assurances

May 19, 2026

Illustration: Lovelace/Susan Q Yin on Unsplash/Commonwealth Foundation/LinkedIn

WHAT’S HAPPENED?

THE ORGANISER of a prestigious short story competition is standing by its decision to award a prize to an author who appears to have used generative AI to compile his entry. Earlier the Commonwealth Foundation said it was reviewing its selection process after claims on social media said Jamir Nazir, the Caribbean regional winner of its short story contest, had used ChatGPT.

Then later in a statement to Charting Gen AI the Foundation insisted its judging process had been “robust”, and that all five regional winners of its Commonwealth Short Story Prize had “personally stated that no AI” had been used. “Upon further consultation, the Foundation has confirmed this,” it said.

Granta, which has published Nazir’s short story The Serpent in the Grove on its website — part of his award alongside a £2,500 ($3,350, €2,890) cash prize — told Charting it was “alarmed” by speculation that it “may have been AI-generated”. The story would remain online while the Foundation continued to investigate, the literary magazine and book publisher said.

Announcing the regional winners of the short story prize — the contest attracted nearly 8,000 entries across the Commonwealth’s 56 nations — novelist and screenwriter Louise Doughty, chair of the judges, said the five winning writers shared “an ability to take their readers by the hand and lead them into a world where the characters are utterly believable, the prose assured, and the author has something important to say”.

Sharma Taylor, the Jamaican writer and lawyer who judged the Caribbean regional entries, praised Nazir’s language as being “sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy”. His short biography on the Foundation’s website described him as a “prolific poet and author, with books published and others forthcoming”:

Illustration: Lovelace/Commonwealth Foundation

However Charting could only find two self-published books on Amazon, one from 2018 and another from 2019. On X, writer and researcher Nabeel Qureshi said: “Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize (The Commonwealth Prize).” Qureshi said sentences using the ‘not x, but y’ construction frequently found in AI outputs were “everywhere” along with “other obvious markers of AI writing”. Charting tested the opening paragraphs of Nazir’s story using the Pangram AI detector. It found they were AI-generated:

According to the Hive Moderation tool, Nazir’s photograph — used on the Foundation’s website and in social media posts announcing his win — was 99.9% likely to be AI-generated, with a 99.7% chance that ChatGPT-4o had been used:

We asked the Foundation whether it permitted stories to be generated using AI, and if so, why it was allowing people to use AI tools trained on the copyrighted works of other authors without their consent. In a statement, Razmi Farook, the Foundation’s director general, told Charting that claims regarding the use of generative AI were being taken “seriously”.

“Our judging process is robust. Each story is assessed through a thorough process which involves multiple rounds of readers before progressing to the final judging panel. We do not currently use AI checkers in our judging process because this is a prize for unpublished fiction. To supply unpublished original work to an AI checker would raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership. We also do not use AI to judge stories at any stage of the process.

“When they submit stories to the Prize, writers accept our entry rules and guidelines. These include confirming that their submission is their own original work. All shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used and, upon further consultation, the Foundation has confirmed this.”

She added: “We place our confidence in the integrity of our contributors and the calibre and experience of the judges and chair of the judging panel, and stand by the assurances given by our authors as part of our process.” Tonight the statement also appeared on the Foundation’s website.

In her statement to Charting, Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing said: “We are alarmed by the speculation that one of this year’s five winning stories, Jamir Nazir’s The Serpent in the Grove, may have been AI-generated.

“Granta editors were not involved with these stories or their selection beyond copy-editing them upon receipt. While the Foundation is still determining whether the story was written by AI, we will keep the story on our website.”

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

✨Little is known about Nazir. His LinkedIn profile describes him as a business consultant whose skills include organisational effectiveness and public speaking. There’s no mention of his interest in writing, or self-publishing. Eight months ago he posted the view that humans were likely to excel alongside AI, using the example of “a writer and AI exploring creative territory neither could reach alone”. The Commonwealth Foundation says it’s confirmed that no AI was used without explaining how it arrived at that conclusion beyond asking each of the winners. In the case of Nazir the evidence to the contrary is compelling. Yes, AI detectors aren’t fool-proof. Which is why Wikipedia relies on human intuition — the same human intuition that has detected frequent AI tells in Nazir’s story. Perhaps the most obvious AI tell of all though is his use of an image that’s so obviously AI-generated. An image that the Foundation has used repeatedly in its communications. If on further inspection it is found that AI was heavily involved in his winning entry then the use of that image should have served as a red flag, prompting judges to ask the obvious question: ‘If he’s used it for his photo, has he used it elsewhere?’