Montreal author Chanel Sutherland won the 2025 Commonwealth Prize for her story Descend, in which enslaved Africans share their stories while aboard a sinking ship.Supplied
Allegations of artificial intelligence-generated writing in a prestigious short-story contest have shaken the literary world – and have left Montreal author Chanel Sutherland to defend her work as genuinely human.
Her publisher, House of Anansi Press, is warning about the perils of using AI to hunt down AI, too.
Ms. Sutherland was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and moved to Canada at 10. She won the 2025 Commonwealth Prize for her story Descend, in which enslaved Africans share their stories while aboard a sinking ship.
After numerous social-media discussions about the 2026 prize’s regional winners, an Atlantic article this week said that a scientist with the AI-detection service Pangram ran numerous Commonwealth Prize-winning stories through the platform, including Descend. The Atlantic reported that Pangram flagged 88 per cent of the story’s text was likely AI-generated.
Ms. Sutherland strongly denies this. “I stand by my work and wrote this story on my own,” she said in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail, adding that she does not use AI for any of her writing and editing work.
She found it “troubling” that her work had been pulled into the controversy. “This story is rooted in Vincentian oral storytelling tradition, which by nature is formulaic and relies on repetition, rhythm, and patterned language as core elements of their structure.”
The saga has raised numerous concerns in the literary world about both the rise of unchecked AI in writing and the ethics of policing it.
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Ms. Sutherland released her debut short-story collection with Toronto’s House of Anansi Press earlier this month. Publisher Karen Brochu said she had no concerns whatsoever that the author’s work could have been created by AI.
“The fact that Pangram is unable to identify something written in a culturally specific voice – in the case of Sutherland’s story, Vincentian oral storytelling tradition – as anything other than AI-generated is further proof of the (well-documented) biases found in AI,” Ms. Brochu said in an e-mail.
Ms. Sutherland is “a talented and award-winning writer who has been published in journals and collecting accolades since well before the rise of ChatGPT and its ilk,” the publisher added. (Ms. Sutherland won the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize and 2022 CBC Short Story Prize.)
Marilyn Biderman, Ms. Sutherland’s agent, also defended the author’s work, telling The Globe on Friday in an e-mail that Ms. Sutherland’s “belief in the sanctity of artistic practice is far too elevated for her to even contemplate the use of AI in it. I stand by Chanel 1,000 per cent.”
In a statement on the Commonwealth Foundation website, director-general Razmi Farook wrote that “we do not currently use AI checkers in our judging process because this is a prize for unpublished fiction. To supply unpublished original work to an AI checker would raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership. We also do not use AI to judge stories at any stage of the process.”
Mr. Farook added: “Until a sufficient tool or process to reliably detect the use of AI emerges that can also grapple with the challenges pertaining to working with unpublished fiction, the Foundation and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize must operate on the principle of trust.”
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Many AI services have allegedly been trained on copyrighted material, which has prompted numerous lawsuits across the publishing industry as people seek to protect the value behind their writing.
Ms. Brochu said she found it “deeply troubling” that people in the publishing sector have fed copyrighted material into AI services to “prove” the authenticity of the writing without recognizing the consequences. She said Anansi includes clauses in its contracts with authors not to use their material to train AI services.
“The fact that we trust AI with its own policing feels like a dystopian hell,” Ms. Brochu said. “There are certainly going to be bad actors, and there are going to be innocent people whose careers are marred by accusation. I don’t know what the publishing world will look like in five years, but I know the solution is not to turn on one another on the word of a robot.”
The U.K. literary magazine Granta, which has long published Commonwealth Prize-winning stories, said that it had no control over the selection of the winners and would keep all stories on its website until the Commonwealth Foundation made a determination about their provenance.
Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing said in a statement that there is “a certain irony in the fact that beyond human hunches AI itself is the most efficient tool we have for revealing what is AI-generated.
“But the AI-generated critique of these Commonwealth writers – more than one has been accused of basing their story on AI material – may conceivably itself reflect AI bias. Time will tell.”