Jamir Nazir has become the face of the AI-writing crisis. In May, the largely unknown 62-year-old Trinidadian writer was named a regional winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize for his short story “The Serpent in the Grove.” But after it was published in the literary magazine Granta, signs began to emerge that the story—about a cocoa farmer who cheated on his wife, and then tried to kill her—may have been AI-generated. Among other indicators, Pangram, an imperfect but industry-leading AI detection tool, flagged the story’s text as 100 percent artificial.
Inscrutable lines plucked from Nazir’s dense prose were mocked and memed. A young woman in the story “had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Another “smiled like sunrise over a sink.” Soon, other winners’ stories came under suspicion. The Commonwealth Foundation defended the authors, saying that all had testified that their work was original, but it pledged to investigate further.
On Tuesday, the Commonwealth Foundation announced that “The Serpent in the Grove” had been chosen from among the regional winners as this year’s overall prize winner. “The team worked hard to understand Jamir’s creative process and learn how he shaped his story over time,” a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Foundation told me in an email. Razmi Farook, the organization’s director general, had previously issued a statement on the results of its probe: “After a thorough consultation with our judges and careful consideration of all available information, we are satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories.” He noted that the investigation did not make use of Pangram or other AI-detection tools, because of their inability to provide conclusive evidence as well as “concerns regarding artistic ownership and consent.” Instead, the foundation said it had held “detailed discussions” about the regional winners’ creative process and examined “working drafts, time-stamped documents and notes” that showed how they developed their stories.
In a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, Nazir told me he feels vindicated—and relieved. “Look, I didn’t use it!” he said about AI. Now that he has won the prize, Nazir said, he is free at last to explain his process and clear his name.
We talked for more than an hour about his writing process, his health (he referenced complications with both diabetes and cancer), and his views on technology. On several occasions, he seemed to avoid answering my questions directly; when he did, some of the answers were circuitous. I was surprised to hear him opine that AI-generated writing will soon be widely accepted in literature, even as he maintained that he didn’t use AI tools in creating his story. He seemed bullish on AI overall, viewing it as a revolutionary technology, though he worried about the repercussions of saying so. Although he couldn’t name any works by Derek Walcott, a writer he cited as one of his main literary inspirations, he said he had prepared a collection of short stories in Walcott’s style, which he hopes to publish soon.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Will Oremus: How did it feel to win this award after all of the controversy you’ve endured since you were named a finalist?
Jamir Nazir: Yes, there’s been a lot of controversy preceding this win, and it’s been really hard. To hear people smearing me, and reading all of the crap. They didn’t know there was a real human and a real family behind the story.
One of my most joyful moments in receiving the news that I won the award was sharing it with my mother, who will be 82 in August. My nephews have kept her informed on lots of the negative things. I didn’t take a sword and plunge it into her side, but I felt as though I supplied the sword by entering the competition. So it made me feel so good when I could tell her that I had won despite all the nonsense that they were seeing.
Oremus: I know you’ve said you didn’t use AI while writing this story. But I’m interested to hear more about your writing process. People were curious how you produced this work that was so dense that it almost reads more like poetry than prose.
Nazir: I was born with diabetes. And as a result of that, conventional typing on a keyboard—it’s extremely difficult for me. As I’ve gotten older, the neuropathy has gotten worse. Sitting for long periods of time at a desk gives me some back problems. So what happened is I decided: Look—no better place to write than the couch. And as a result of that, I found out that I can use the speech-to-text function of the Google keyboard on my Android phone …That’s what’s actually producing words, and then I edit them and so on.
That has given me the opportunity to significantly polish text. Because you know, on an Android phone, when the keyboard comes up, you only have a very small space, about three and a half inches, to see the writing. So I would look at those lines, and hold those words in my mind, and keep reviewing them, keep polishing.
But to back up a bit: Why the hell—sorry for the expression—would I need AI? It was absolutely not needed in this story, because I lived this. The story actually has a lot of real people, real places, and real situations. Even the little bread shop I wrote about in the story actually exists—not in my small, little village here now, but where my wife came from, which is another small village.
Oremus: You’ve explained why you think the AI-writing detectors might have mistakenly flagged your story. How did you convince the Commonwealth committee that you didn’t use AI after all?
Nazir: They requested a lot of documentation. They made it clear it was voluntary to produce these materials, because they were not part of the initial rules. But I had to produce all of the previous drafts, and also my character profiles I had sketched out. And of course, I originally had to sign saying that no AI was used.
Oremus: You’ve talked about how the unusual writing style in “The Serpent in the Grove” stemmed from your love of poetry. Who are a couple of your favorite poets who have inspired you?
Nazir: The first one whose poetry I fell in love with was a guy known as Pablo Neruda from Chile. And his teacher or mentor was a lady known as Gabriela Mistral. Both of them had a profound impact on me. Then there is Derek Walcott, a Caribbean poet who, like Pablo Neruda, is a Nobel Prize winner. The thing that got me attracted to Walcott was his complete disregard for the traditional Western sentence structure, which people cite as one of the things that proves my writing was AI. But Walcott created his own style.
I looked at how they all write, and I write poetry in their style too. AI must have been fed all their work. And another thing to that: I have significant poems that I’ve posted in several poetry groups on Facebook. Once it’s on Facebook, AI companies will have data-mined that, right? So they have all of that as a reflection of my style as well, right? I wonder if they can attempt to claim it as their own, as AI-generated. Do you think that’s possible?
Oremus: So you mean that AI gets trained on human writing, and then it generates similar writing?
Nazir: Okay, say AI has been trained with the writing of Will. So it understands what Will does, right? Now, when it sees Will’s writing again—if somebody puts Will’s article through an AI detector—because it’s familiar with that style and construct, it tells itself, This must be generated by an AI system. I’m wondering if it is possible.
Oremus: I don’t know. That’s not how a tool like Pangram works. It’s looking for statistical patterns in the language that are more commonly produced by AI systems than by human writers.
Nazir: But is that true? Why, then, has no court of law in any country, even the tiniest country in the world, accepted as admissible any AI-detector system? Not one country. So that shows you, in terms of the reliability—I’m not saying it’s not helpful, but I think there’s still a lot of refining.
Oremus: You had mentioned some of your inspirations earlier, including Walcott and Neruda. What’s your favorite Walcott work?
Nazir: Walcott has a lot of Caribbean poems, right? And I cannot—there are several, and they talk about the destruction of a village because of the sea. And I wrote something like that. It’s quite a change. And I am advertising a little bit, but I have a collection that I have written, my Caribbean collection, sort of Walcott-style. I tried to edit it as much myself as I could, and it’s ready for publication. So hopefully this award will give me the platform to publish this.
Oremus: But do you have a favorite of Walcott’s poems?
Nazir: A story of Walcott’s?
Oremus: Yeah.
Nazir: To be honest with you, I can’t think of a specific favorite right now. I am getting a little bit of brain fog in recall. I had an excellent memory, and now it haunts me because at times I can’t remember even basic stuff. I think it’s a part of the condition, the illness. And I’m on chemotherapy as well. So that is a hard thing.
Oremus: Some of your posts on LinkedIn, as people have pointed out, are a very different style from your fiction. Which, of course, makes sense, right? I mean, fiction is a completely different mode of writing. But I wondered if maybe you used AI on the LinkedIn posts.
Nazir: No, no, no. I did research with AI. But in terms of the actual writing—I had grown accustomed to very technical and precise writing. I think that AI is a good tool for research— that’s the most value.
And on the same topic of that, what about the typewriter? When the typewriter was first invented, writers kicked hell and said, The thing is writing. You’re supposed to use a quill or your fountain pen. And there was a big hullabaloo. We passed that, and then next came new word processors. I can tell you word processors are machine assistants, because they can check the spelling, right? They can search, find and replace, suggest synonyms, et cetera. Modern-day word processing can do almost everything. Where’s the uproar? It settled down. Now I think the same thing will happen with AI.
Oremus: Because you think that eventually AI will be accepted as just another tool for writers the way that a word processor is, what is so bad about using it? Why not use it?
Nazir: No, I’m not saying it’s bad. But because of this current time, where the debate is on, like it was on for the typewriter or the word processor, I wouldn’t encourage any writers in any kind of literary competition to utilize it now for fear of people criticizing them. Look—I didn’t use it! It’s not only me, Will. It’s also all these people who are painted with this AI brush, right? So I imagine you should stay away from it for any literary competition for the next two or three years. I think that discussions will be held and so on, and then people will get an opportunity to vent.
I don’t know if I’m walking on dangerous ground here with you, because as I was told a lot by the wife and other people, Do not show any appreciation for AI. I see it as being a tool incorporated in the future. Because a lot of people use it—a lot of people.
