‘Mob believes the machine’: Commonwealth prize winner Sharon Aruparayil denies AI use

The controversy

The accusations, which have forced a reckoning in the world of letters, cropped up after the stories of all five regional finalists were published in the prestigious British literary magazine, Granta. Initially, readers took to social media upon spotting “telltale signs of AI” in the story of the 61-year-old Caribbean regional winner Jamir Nazir. Then, the popular AI-detector Pangram–which was also used as evidence during the Shy Girl controversy–backed the allegations, declaring the winning story, The Serpent in the Grove as 100 per cent AI generated.

Before long, two other finalists found themselves swept in the controversy as readers ran other stories through Pangram, which declared Maltese writer John Edward DeMicoli’s award-winning entry The Bastion’s Shadow 100 per cent AI generated, and 25-year-old Aruparayil’s story, Mehendi Nights–about a group of women who have been forbidden language finding expression through a henna artist’s designs–to be partly AI generated. The same software, however, declared the entries of Lisa-Anne Julien (South Africa) and Holly Ann Miller to be human written.

‘How am I supposed to trust the reader?’

On the onslaught of condemnation that poured in response to the accusations, Aruparayil says, “The mob believes the machine, and the machine gets to control the narrative of what deserves to be ‘human-written’.”

She said that she had spent years “having my writing sanded down to fit the ‘universal’ reader, and this situation further cements the loss of literature, taste, and perhaps even the ability of genuine critical commentary. How am I supposed to trust in my reader if they cannot even trust themselves?”

“Who will I write for if my audience is hell-bent on feeding my work to the big bad AI machine and ready to crucify me based on what it says? And what about the violation of my rights as a creative whose writing style, that took years of labour in the dark, to suddenly be a prompt away?” she asked.

On the tells that caused her work to be classified as partly AI, she says, “Shorter, snappier sentences showed AI until I put in just three Marathi words and removed one word from the triad in that section to make it 100% human written. I have not invented the rule of thirds, have I?”

Are AI detectors reliable

A 2023 Stanford study found that detectors incorrectly labelled over 61 per cent of essays written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated. Neurodivergent writers, legal writers, and those working in formal registers face similar false positives.

Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing has acknowledged that the magazine had “no control over the selection of the Commonwealth Prize stories” and ran The Serpent in the Grove through Anthropic’s Claude, which concluded the story was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.”

The Commonwealth Foundation, in the meantime, has launched a “thorough, transparent review” of the selection process, with director general Razmi Farook observing that requiring unpublished original work to be run through AI checkers “would raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership.”

Aruparayil has been previously nominated for the Deodar Prize, the PEN/Dau Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Pushcart Prize 2026. She is currently expanding Mehendi Nights into a debut book. The overall winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize will be announced at an online ceremony on June 30, 2026. She remains in contention.