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When AI vies for literary glory

The 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize was caught in a storm over charges of AI use in its winning entries.

The point of literature, after all, is not merely to dazzle a reader with craftsmanship.

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2 min read Oct 23, 2026 06:15 AM IST First published on: Oct 23, 2026 at 06:15 AM IST

In 2023, a year after the launch of ChatGPT, the Authors Guild in the US, including writers such as John Grisham and George RR Martin, sued OpenAI, alleging that their copyrighted books had been used without permission to train its artificial intelligence models. Three years on, the literary establishment finds itself confronting a different stage of the same upheaval: Whether literature written with AI’s assistance should be formally recognised and rewarded.…