When a growing chorus of readers and critics accused Jamir Nazir, winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize, of using AI to write his winning entry, I did what any writer with a healthy amount of professional dread would do — I read it.

Nazir’s work, “The Serpent in the Grove,” certainly bears many of the characteristics we’ve come to associate with AI writing. Bizarre metaphors and overly compressed language initially come across as bold, but a second read — and the strange language demands one — reveals the words for what they are: eye-catching tissue paper wrapped around an empty box.

The question of who wrote “The Serpent in the Grove” was one of several AI-generated writing controversies to emerge in May — a book reviewer for The New York Times and a Nobel Prize-winning novelist were at the centers of two others.…