The invention of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to the proliferation of AI tools in our day-to-day lives. Other sectors, such as data analytics, coding, programming, backend and frontend development, personal management, and others, have embraced AI as the new trend of civilization, recognizing its importance beyond the realm of plagiarism. However, in the arts, the presence of this technology remains controversial. Because AI has the tendency to produce works that distance themselves from human experience and generate plagiarized copies, its place in the arts is no different from leprosy among the Jews. Its use is frowned upon, regardless of the extent.
AI has its usefulness, and as Jamir, the 2026 winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, affirmed, everyone uses AI. Controversies over whether he himself used AI in his winning entry have not been resolved. Yet, as he noted in his interview with Will, he never used it; in fact, he opposes those who do. The critique of a work of art, even when aided by AI (which is AI’s primary function), often looks for similarities that point to previous works or evaluates the work by comparing it with the artist’s philosophy, ideology, and the principles that underpin it. A short story is a reflexive narrative that emerges as an impulse from the writer. When what the writer says and what he writes no longer align, the work can easily be flagged as AI-generated.
Serpent in a Grove, after being published in Granta, was flagged by readers as AI-generated content. Several reasons were put forward; however, the Commonwealth Foundation went ahead and crowned the story the overall winner of this year’s competition. This leaves one wondering how the Commonwealth judges its stories: does it judge from the standpoint of sophistry, or does it look beyond polished language to the original meaning and the philosophical depth a work carries? Jamir’s winning story conveys a reflection that feels almost too deep to be natural, like a heavily painted face.
The story was criticized for its excessive use of metaphors and similes. At times, these comparisons created gaps in meaning rather than clarity. One description that caught readers’ attention was the claim that a woman’s catwalk “made benches become men.” Questions quickly arose about how a woman’s swaying hips could cause wooden benches to become men. In an interview with Kevin Jared, shared on his Facebook page, this question was raised. Jamir explained that he was developing an illusion around Zoongie, who believes she is an answered prayer to everything around her, including the inanimate objects in her environment.
There are numerous examples of uneven comparisons throughout the story, although a few succeed. The opening line, “They say the grove still hums at noon,” probably suggests the whispering atmosphere of the grove. It then goes on to describe that sound as a “belly sound” before introducing Vishnu, Sita’s husband, and Puttie, their three-year-old son, who loves frolicking in the yard.
Jamir introduces each character in haste, as though they are naked Adam and Eve concealed only by the fig leaves of description. A large portion of the story is heavily descriptive, at times burdened with unnecessary detail and at other times overly trimmed. As a work of fiction, it falls short of creating fully realized characters, producing instead fleeting, almost illusory figures. Pastoral as the story is, the characters seem to exist only to observe the serpent in the grove, witness the quiet passage of life, and eventually die. Short stories should, at the very least, contain conflict and resolution, whereas Serpent in a Grove is an idyllic narrative that feels flat in both its storytelling and its plot.
The story explores the life of Vishnu, a cocoa farmer, his wife, Sita, and their son. Within the grove stands a rum shop, and Zoongie, who is implied to be having an affair with Vishnu. There is also Marsha, a close relative. As the story unfolds through heavy descriptions, metaphors, and didactic statements, Sita falls into a well and injures her leg. Marsha and Vishnu rush her to the hospital, but before doing so, they wrap her injured leg with a towel. She receives treatment at the hospital. Puttie grows up remembering the well as the place where his mother fell. Years later, he returns to the grove with his daughter, who asks why he keeps staring at the well. He tells her he remembers it as the place where Mama fell. The story then concludes with hyphenated, poetic, didactic lines.
What puzzled many readers was the apparent contradiction in the title. As they read, they searched for the serpent, wondering who or what it represented. In the author’s notes beneath the story, Jamir states that the serpent is not a literal snake, but he stops there. Critics have identified Zoongie as the serpent in the grove, just as Will suggested in his introductory article in The Atlantic, where he points out that Vishnu cheats on his wife with her. However, her influence on the story is barely felt. Apart from her seductive walk that supposedly arouses even benches into becoming men, she neither harms nor significantly affects any of the other characters. If she does, it remains so well disguised that the story never clearly suggests it.
Language is one of the criteria for successful poetry and prose. When Will asked Jamir why he writes the way he does, Jamir gave two reasons. The first was his health. Throughout the interview, he repeatedly referred to his diabetes as the primary influence on his highly impressionistic style.
“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.”
The second reason was his love of poetry. Will pressed him further, asking which writers had influenced him. Jamir mentioned Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott. Will then asked which of Walcott’s poems had influenced him. Jamir could not name a single one, explaining that his diabetes causes brain fog, which affects his memory. This raises an obvious question: how can a work of art profoundly influence someone if they cannot recall even one example of it?
What makes his reference to Derek Walcott particularly interesting is the way Serpent in a Grove is written. The story reads like poetry. Reading Serpent in a Grove is akin to reading The Translators by Wole Soyinka. Both make extensive use of poetic language and poetic license, allowing words to function beyond their conventional meanings. Derek Walcott employs this technique frequently in his free verse poetry.
On the subject of technology and creativity, Jamir is optimistic that AI will eventually become widely accepted and may even replace aspects of original creation. He told Will:
“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 got past that, and then came word processors. I can tell you word processors are machine assistants because they can check spelling, search, find and replace, suggest synonyms, et cetera. Modern-day word processors can do almost everything. Where’s the uproar? It settled down. Now I think the same thing will happen with AI.”
Jamir denied ever using AI to write the story, although some researchers used large language models (LLMs) to test it. The Commonwealth Foundation also affirmed that the winning story is not AI-generated. With the controversies surrounding this year’s winning story, one begins to wonder whether the 2027 edition of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize will be flooded with AI-generated submissions. One also wonders whether, as Jamir predicts, AI will eventually overturn creativity itself.
