Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” has many of the hallmarks of LLM-generated prose — mixed metaphors, anaphora, lists of threes. (I’m aware this, too, is a list of threes, and I promise I wrote this post myself, unassisted, as I write all things.) I’ll admit I was initially unconvinced by the allegation that Nazir’s story had been generated by AI. I know people are using LLMs to help them write — or to write for them, period — but I’ve been wary of the sort of AI paranoia that has developed among my peers. Em dashes are supposedly an AI tell, as are the word “delve” and the aforementioned lists. Short, punchy sentences, too, especially when used to punctuate a succession of longer sentences.

But I, a human being, have certainly used all of the above in my writing before. LLMs, after all, are trained on human writing. They mirror what they’ve been fed. And yet there’s an eerie quality to AI-generated prose. There’s something off about it, even if you can’t immediately tell what it is. If there are specific AI tells, and I’m using those tells right now, then how do you know I actually wrote this?

Nabeel S. Qureshi, a former visiting scholar of AI at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, was among the first to point out the suspected use of AI in Nazir’s story. For Qureshi, the first two sentences were proof enough.

They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vibe, but a belly sound — as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.