NB: This literary enormity is very serious, but I have no idea whether the academic community will take it seriously. I have taught for many years, but these past few weeks have made me more concerned than ever before about what AI is doing to the minds and mentalities of our younger generation. It’s bad enough that our current poltical dispensation is hostile to the social sciences and liberal arts, going so far as to use administrative power to censor seminars and discussion on themes it sees as antithetical to the homogenising ideology of its parent body.

For many years, a broad section of students is primarily motivated by ‘good grades’ and ‘GPA’s and ‘ROI’s rather than acquiring an education. These numerical markers are seen as a ticket to campuses abroad – which for their part, have come to depend the high fees they charge from students from Asia, the Middle East and China. Indian students migrating annually are approximately over 6 lacs; and the total number of Indians studying abroad as of a year ago was 1.8 million. Stricter rules have made it more difficult but the aspiration remains as strong as ever. Thoughtful citizens may reflect on why this is so. If we are the guru’s of the globe, why are so many young Indians – intelligent or not – so desperate to exit the country?

This situation has been made far worse by the advent of AI and its impact on mentalities already attuned to inflated grading patterns. In my student days, 60% in a social science or humanities course was a first division and a welcome achievement; nowadays anything less than 90% is considered a disaster. The amount of actual reading, study and debate is declining, atomisation is the social norm; and attending lectures is a burden to be borne with the help of smartphones and laptops. All this is not so much the fault of young people as that of our educational system and the attitude of certain elected representatives, for whom education is not a means of developing the intellectual potential of society, but of indoctrination and mass-scale moral and mental sloth.

The ideas of four thinkers possess an uncanny resonance as regards their observation of the tendency of human creations to escape human control; to acquire independent momentum and become something autonomous altogether. This is what reminds me of AI – the mind itself is made redundant. ‘Dumbing down’ is too mild a term. What is happening is more akin to mass lobotomy: a godsend to dictators and corporate tyrants.

The thinkers I have in mind are as follows. I have added some titles along with some blog-posts:

Gunther Anders (Hannah Arendt’s first husband) saw it in technology – especially post Hiroshima

Simone Weil saw it in violence, in her brilliant observations on Homer’s Iliad

Emmanuel Levinas saw it in the reduction of humans to sheer animality

Karl Marx saw it in the autotelic nature of capital, as something (treated as) beyond human knowledge or control

They all say the same thing (in a sense): that humans have created a Frankenstein which apparently (here lies the function of ideology and cultivated stupidity), that society is incapable of controlling; that has enslaved us. The global economy and society at large have passed into the hands of criminals and pathological lunatics. War, technology and capital have fused into the modern avatar of Hobbes’ Behemoth. AI has emerged as its cutting edge.

Audrey Burowski – Gunther Anders: Philosopher of the apocalypse

The Concrete Possibility of Total Nihilism: Günther Anders and the Atomic Bomb

Emmanuel Levinas; Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism; (1934) 

Simone Weil; The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1940) ———— DS

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Kevin Jared Hosein on Facebook

The first blow was by Trickidadian, Jamir Nazir, with his AI-alleged short story, The Serpent in the Grove (The Snake in the Grass). The second was by the Commonwealth Foundation itself, whom has decided to support Nazir and the judges who selected his story. It may not be important to all, but I also say this as someone who has greatly benefited from the Commonwealth Foundation. I was a Caribbean regional winner in 2015, and an overall winner in 2018. I have also had work published in their magazine, adda, and some of their anthologies. Their partnership with the Bocas Lit Fest helped me connect with my current literary agent (a true godsend for my literary career).

I am pasting some words I said from a conversation I was having with Annie Paul from PREE:

Of course, it is difficult to fully and legally prove the use of AI in the written word—however, much of the evidence is in the story itself and—curiously—his headshot. You will be the jury. Jamir’s headshot, first of all, is a product of AI modification. The individual looks nothing like it. He has admitted this. If he is willing to dupe the Foundation with this, why stop there? I had assumed his story was AI from the line: “No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light…” because of the successive use of triad, em-dash and contrastive negation (not X but Y). Of course, AI does this because writers do this and have been doing this for many, many years (even myself). It has been trained on real writing. Still, it remains a tic of the machine that keen readers can easily single out. if done in the frequency within Nazir’s prose. I dislike how hypervigilant this has made me when reading anything post-2023.

When I got to: “East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it…” I became more suspicious (he has to explain that one to me!). I became confident that this particular section was generated: “They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” That last part is purely nonsensical, and seemed like a product of AI hallucination until I realised he likely wanted it to express “Zoongie gave all the men wood (erections) as she walked by”. AI guardrails, of course, limit it from writing anything sexual, disturbing or violent, so we end up with benches become men. This is my issue with AI-generated, or heavily AI-assisted writing. It lacks intentionality behind the strangeness it evokes as ‘great’ literature. In fact, the storytelling is quite poor, and none of his metaphor and simile serve the characters or the narrative. The closer you look at it, you may see how it employs heavy use of (unearned) aphorism and I always find AI stories to be floaty or glide-y, like it can never really settle on a particular moment and sustain emotion or tension, only ideas of it. I liken it to a hypnotist’s pendulum, as it can be hypnotising! Mesmerising! Always moving and distracting! And ultimately a grift.

AI especially loves quiet somethings, something silences, shape of somethings, somethings like a secret, something is always bearing the brunt of something and something incorporeal is always witnessing something, the conscience of something is present in another something. It does love its actual ‘somethings’, as well. It tends to make intangible things hum, buzz, whisper, pulse and flicker (the wind pulses, the heat whispers, the conscience flickers). There is also the incessant pairing of concrete with the non-concrete, e.g. Jamir’s “rum hot as apology”, “bush keeps memory”, “laughter with iron”.

There is a disappointing linguistic homogeneity that occurs and reoccurs if you read enough generated fiction. It almost reads like marketing-speak, doesn’t it? It always tends to the median, but in a sort of uncanny valley where stories seem simultaneously overwritten and underwritten. What exactly does “Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture” mean? Do women mash up the benches that supposedly become men in this village? I am a big fan of writers like Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx, whom were among the crop once criticised for having ‘muscular’, pretentious prose (especially by critic, BR Myers), but even the worst convoluted cases of it make sense and seem to have intentionality. When McCarthy writes the line, “A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool…” it is a bizarre image, but you know it has to do something with being arrested, petrified by a gaze, or when he describes riverstones as “lozenges”, we can imagine the smooth (and smoothed) shape being lapped by water.

Even if it weren’t AI, how could one see award-worthy writing in: “Laughter can cut a hush, not cure it,” and “Doing is a treacherous bridge.”

If you look at Sam Altman’s (ChatGPT/OpenAI) short story here to catch how AI uses ‘literary’ language: https://x.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115

Yes, there is no way to 100% prove it is not AI. But a human judge should not have selected this story as a winner or a nominee in the first place. It should have been immediately banished to the slush. I believe the Foundation and the judges need to apologise to the other 8000-and-change writers who submitted to this competition in 2026. I was also once a judge for this Prize in 2022. We are human and have our own failings. Judges are not infallible! A Foundation, or any literary institution, meant for uplifting untold stories should not side with fraud. They have a no-AI rule for competition entries. But if there is no willingness or visible intention to uphold it, of what use is the rule?

AI will get better as time goes by, behind bigger and bigger paywalls in an increasingly capitalist society, and then perhaps maybe only one class of writer may be able to write and publish.

As of this writing, Commonwealth Foundation Creatives has decided to uphold their decision and keep Nazir as the Caribbean winner. Granta has chosen to support whatever decision they make. The only decision we should make when it comes to AI-generated fiction is to ferociously reject it, and to ferociously reject the institutions that support it. Do not reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears.

If you are a writer doing this, stop it. Your time would be better spent reading other writers, attending workshops and — for goodness sake — thinking of words to write.

Source: Facebook

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