The scandal started the usual way. Readers noticed AI-like prose in a written work and took to ridiculing it online. Some ran the writing through an AI-detection platform that labeled it entirely AI-generated. The institutions involved in its publication scrambled to figure out what had happened. The details in this particular scandal have to do with an all-but-unknown Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir. His story “The Serpent in the Grove” was among five regional winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The award came with 2,500 British pounds and publication on the website of Granta, a prestigious British literary magazine. Earlier this week, readers started gleefully tearing Nazir’s work apart online, posting screenshots showing canned stylistic patterns and a proliferation of weird metaphors: “Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc,” read one line. “A major milestone for AI, at any rate,” one person deadpanned. Subsequent sleuthing only reinforced the early suspicions: The photo of Nazir on the prize website was almost too slick-looking; his LinkedIn page was filled with florid posts …