FOR the final three years since ChatGPT was launched, distinguished writers, editors and litterateurs have been brazenly hostile to the thought of AI having the ability to write fiction, poetry or prose — certainly, any sort of literature. The tech corporations that launched all these LLMs, imagining ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Copilot as writing aids, research buddies, collaborators and co-authors, have thrown a nuclear bomb into the literary world, and most of its inhabitants are nonetheless in a crouch place, bracing for an affect that detonated again in 2022.
However the literary world should name a truce as a result of AI is right here to remain. Furthermore, any author who teaches writing, any literary editor or agent who evaluates submissions, any practitioner known as upon to evaluate a literary competitors should turn out to be AI literate; it is an unavoidable ability that is merely a part of the job any further.
Final week, the Commonwealth Writing Prize and Granta revealed 5 regional brief story winners, one among which, Jamir Nazar’s ‘A Serpent within the Grove‘, was singled out as probably AI-generated. It raised a furore on social media but it surely did not shock me in any respect. I’ve graded a whole bunch of scholar essays, judged artistic writing capstones and a significant Pakistani literary prize within the final 12 months. A lot is now written with the assistance of AI that I really feel overwhelmed.
I have been utilizing the final two years to study precisely how AI writes — not simply its processes, however its type and its voice. I’ve studied it as a lot as I might research any human writer, on the lookout for the way it handles dialogue, description, character and plot. But if I might caught my head within the sand and refused to the touch AI for the sake of inventive integrity, I might be letting down all these individuals who belief my judgment and experience.
College students are hooked on AI not as a result of they need to cheat, however as a result of they’re fearful of wanting silly or insufficient.
I spent hours tinkering with AI, asking it to write down issues in a Pakistani context: a synopsis for a Harry Potter ebook set in Lahore; Descriptions of Karachi. AI churned out showy, contrived prose that appears prefer it’s doing lots with out truly saying something significant. It blathered inanities about Karachi being a “metropolis that remembers” and Pakistani ladies who “sauntered by the”. bazaar as if their our bodies bore the load of generations of household secrets and techniques”. AI wrote verbal pyrotechnics with no emotional connection to the town that I really like.
It is an excessive amount of of a temptation to count on folks, particularly college students, to not use AI to write down. Pakistan is a former British colony with a postcolonial hangover concerning the English language, though few of us converse it fluently and even fewer can write it effectively. But the language of instruction in prime Pakistani colleges and universities has remained and can all the time be English. College students are hooked on AI not as a result of they need to cheat, however as a result of they’re fearful of wanting silly or insufficient. And the LLMs are ever-present to capitalize on that worry. I’ve to maintain telling my college students: AI is right here not that will help you, however to become profitable off you.
Additionally, there’ll by no means be a foolproof AI-detection software. AI will continue to learn extra from each individual that asks it to assist them write a narrative; AI ‘detectors’ will give you a solution based mostly on their very own algorithms and biases. Differentiating AI writing from human writing requires human discernment, the identical school we use to know when writing is elegant or horrible. It requires intuition, expertise and a detailed take a look at the particular person’s work total to see if the story is a illustration of their ordinary type — name it the brand new due diligence in a post-AI world.
The wrongdoer within the Commonwealth Writers debacle was not racism or some sort of Western pandering to the postcolonial author, however sheer ignorance on the a part of judges.
And beneath that ignorance lies a willful denial about simply how seismic the AI shift is. Everybody who should consider writing professionally is afraid of the menace that AI poses to the literary arts and the earnings of the publishing business. They’re fearful of the concept everybody else is already to this point forward that they might by no means be capable of catch up.
AI has already realized to imitate cultural inflections. It is going to speak about any a part of the world — Guyana, South Korea, Bosnia — with pompous certainty and attempt to dazzle you with metaphorically weird surface-level descriptors or overwhelm you with ambiance so you do not notice there’s truly no plot or perception, no empathy, not one of the magnificence that makes writing an artwork in addition to a apply.
Personally, I resent the tech bros who’ve turned my relationship with writing from practitioner to policewoman, turning a jaundiced eye to everybody’s writing and suspecting the worst. AI is now influencing younger folks studying learn how to write to the extent that even my greatest college students have began to sound like AI.
I do know that AI acknowledges patterns and produces solely a facsimile of excellent writing, very similar to the proverbial damaged clock that is proper twice a day. The apply of writing phrases to attach with a reader, talk concepts and inform a narrative is a human endeavor that AI won’t ever be capable of match. Worry will not cease me from wanting it straight within the AI and declaring, “You don’t have any energy over me.” I urge everybody else — writers, lecturers, judges and editors — to do the identical.
The author at the moment teaches Expository Writing at AKUFAS.
Printed in Daybreak, Could thirtieth, 2026
