LLMs Are Revealing How Low the Bar Is (And Lowering It Even Further)

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)For all of the truckloads of money and advanced technology behind LLMs, their primary achievement so far may be in revealing how low the bar is in seemingly every field. The various LLM/AI scandals this week are good evidence of that. Let me do a little recap. A (Likely) AI Slop Story Wins a Literary AwardIf you subscribe to this newsletter, then you likely already know the big literary one: Granta magazine published a story that is seemingly AI-generated from an author with a seemingly AI-generated author photo whose social media profiles are full of AI hype. The story “The Serpent in the Grove,” attributed to Jamir Nazir, was on of the regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize selected by the Commonwealth Foundation. (Granta has responded by saying they asked the LLM Claude whether the story was written by AI—Claude said “almost certainly” involved AI—and that they were keeping the story online until Commonwealth Foundation…