The witch hunters walk the Earth again, no longer rooting out the devil but hunting the machine. Let’s take an example: Jamir Nazir’s story, The Serpent in the Grove. The story won the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and was then accused of having been written with the help of AI. The author denies this.

Certainly. the prose groans under the weight of metaphor it carries.

Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument. It beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan. The day the grove began to remember, the roof over Vishnu Mohammed’s shack groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat. Inside, air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa. A soot-blackened lamp hung from a nail. No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.”

But is this the mark of the machine or the author’s voice? There’s no way to be sure, but there are known “tells” in AI prose.

• Uniform quality and style, together with repetitive phrases and sentences that are similar in length and structure. Human authors tend to write in “bursts” with varying structure.
• Continuity problems. AI may have problems with consistency, Characters, setting, and aplot points may change abruptly.
• Lack of emotional depth. AI may struggle with the nuances and quirks of human emotion and expression.

To these I’d add metaphors that sound metaphory but actually make no sense. An example from the story might be “breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.” Sounds good, but what does that actually mean? However, human authors may also create metaphors that misfire.

I ran the story through a couple of AI detectors, and was less than impressed by the result. GPTZero returned a 100% probability that the story was the work of AI. I listed among the most AI sentences these two: “Vishnu was twenty-five wearing the face of fifty” and “No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped”. The first sentence I found to be one of the more powerful metaphors in the piece, The second is ungrammatical but very human to me,

Copyleaks also set the AI probability at 100%. By contrast, EyeSift put the probability that this was AI generated at 39% (no strong AI evidence).

My own feeling is the story is irritatingly elaborate, but also with a simple thread that’s powerful and haunting in a way that could only be written by a human.