In response to the controversy over Jamir Nazir’s short story ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ winning the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region, the lit magazine Granta published a statement saying that it cannot be known if the story was indeed AI-generated—after feeding the story to Anthropic’s Claude AI.

“We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was AI-generated. The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’,” said Sigrid Rausing, publisher of Granta.

The statement also reproduced the text from Claude, which reads: “The strongest evidence against pure AI authorship is the small number of passages that don’t fit the pattern—particularly the Zoongie morning-greeting and the agricultural paragraph about the acre. Those passages carry the kind of off-shape specificity that models still struggle to produce unprompted. If the story has a human core, it is concentrated there, and the AI has been used to elaborate around it.”

Granta fed Nazir’s story to an AI programme despite the director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation Razmi Farook insisting that it would did not use AI checkers during the judging process as it would “raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership.”

Rausing then pointed to the “irony” of AI being “the most efficient tool we have for revealing what is AI generated.” The magazine did not specify if it had obtained Nazir’s consent to feed the story to Claude, even if it was AI-generated.

The baffling Granta statement ended by noting that it would keep the winning Commonwealth Prize stories up on its website until which point the Commonwealth Foundation comes to a “definite conclusion” on their provenance.