Sometime last year, while struggling to cover coursework on the relationship between law, morality, and religion in time for upcoming exams, I uploaded the materials for the course to ChatGPT and prompted it to explain how these concepts intertwined to me like a 10-year-old, and it performed excellently. Looking back at it now, what I remember most about that period is the fact that my reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) was instinctive, which has now become commonplace in many fields such as medicine, construction, entertainment and war. However, there are still hesitations  amongst practitioners in certain fields that are hesitant to use it, one of which is creative writing. 

On May 13, 2026, the Commonwealth Foundation released the winners of its Short Story Prize. A few days later, the Caribbean regional winner, Jamir Nazir's winning short story, The Serpent in the Grove, was alleged to have been written using AI. In response, the director general of the Commonwealth Foundation, Razmi Farook,  stated that the allegations are being investigated. On why AI detection tools weren't used, she responded that doing so “would raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership”, seeing as the writers themselves had already stated that no AI was used in their works. 

Literature has always been viewed as a creative expression carried out by people, not machines. Readers themselves have also come to see every sentence by writers as a result of specific human consciousness and ingenuity, but AI has come to overturn this, putting creative writing in a crisis of authenticity and originality. This incident speaks to the cultural anxiety of readers and writers alike in the wake of the various ways in which AI can be used. It saliently asks: should writing still be regarded as one of the last cultural practices in which sole human genius is romanticized or should it seek to evolve, like many other aspects of human living have, in light of the AI bloom?

Writing has been understood as one of the highest forms of human intellect and expression. The works of Plato, Karl Marx, Shakespeare, Freud, Kant and many others are revered for their internalised experience and thought, which have been used to shape the world today. Literature, even in the minds of the illiterate, is respected because of the human mind behind it.

This is the background against which AI seeks to integrate itself into writing, especially creative writing. Creative writing seeks to strip layers that often seem complex to describe, to animate what would otherwise have been inanimate. This is why we have fiction, poetry, memoirs,playwriting, songwriting, and short stories, among others, writing that exists only if one taps into the deepest parts of their psyche and is true to themselves. This is perhaps why people feel betrayed when literature benefits from an AI assist. This is what informs the critiques of Jamir's submission, because even though the allegations may be wrong, the fact that the authenticity of his short story is in dispute in the first place is proof of the distrust that shimmers beneath the surface in literature these days.

It is noteworthy to mention that the idea of originality and authenticity, as is perceived in creative writing, is not as pure as many may think. Writing workshops, dictionaries, research assistants, and ghostwriting show that writing isn't something that is done alone by a writer, let alone creative writing. The relationship between an editor and a writer is explained here. The editor feeds the writer's work into a literary furnace to make it better, but the writer is still regarded as the author. This is a practice that has existed for decades, and the issue of authorship of the article, after editing, is never in dispute. 

Inching closer to the present iteration, Grammarly, an AI, is used for grammatical and structural correction. More often than not, suggestions made by this AI in correcting one's work do not seem to compromise the integrity of said work, further establishing the idea that the myth of the completely solitary writer is a creation of literary culture. Even the concept of writing rooms, in the context of creative writing for TV/film scripts, was created so that writers can come together to collaborate on film scripts before production. AI simply represents the latest in supplementary tools created by technology to assist the creative writer in their work. 

But merely summing up AI usage as a supplementary tool for creative writing would be oversimplifying things, especially without a basis. This is because AI, for all its benefits, sacrifices authenticity on the altar of simplicity. It recycles other people's works and ideas and then uses them as the basis for its inspiration. Once inspired by other people's works, it then simply reassembles them into a new text. This is why AI can only plagiarise and not create.  

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