Commonwealth Short Story Prize AI Plagiarism Controversy
Thursday, May 21, 2026 at 11:04AM The current controversy over the winner of the prestigious Commonwealth short story prize, prompted by the presence of supposedly obvious indicators of AI plagiarism and fraud, points to a much wider issue than simply whether the text in question, ‘The Serpent in the Grove’, was created by a human (from the Global South) or by a machine.
https://africasacountry.com/2026/05/how-to-read-postcolonial-writing
It’s in response to precisely these kind of human-vs-AI debates that the design-art collective COPODE and I have launched the 100% Inhuman Made badges project:
Rather than attempting to restore or defend the idea of the soveriegn human author against (the use of) AI, the 100% Inhuman Made project asks whether any work has ever been purely human-made. Writing and cultural production have always depended on distributed systems involving not only ‘authors’, but also institutions, infrastructures, technologies, environments and often invisible forms of labour.
From this perspective, AI is not an absolute rupture so much as the latest addition to already complex assemblages of human and nonhuman actors.
The project launched with an announcement on the London School of Economics Impact Blog titled “Nothing is ‘100% human authored’”:
There is also a project page here.
At the heart of the initiative is a series of generative badges carrying messages such as ‘100% Inhuman Made: Some AI Used’. Unlike fixed certification marks (e.g. ‘100% Human Made: No AI Used’), each badge exists only temporarily: every click produces a new version, while the previous one disappears. The project therefore resists ideas of originality, fixity and singular ownership, unfolding instead through reuse, circulation and transformation.
The badge generator is here.
So the project is part conceptual intervention, part generative artwork and part open experiment in how ideas circulate.
The intention is not to dismiss concerns about AI, the environment or labour, but to open up a broader debate about creativity, authorship and the human at a moment when all three are being renegotiated and reframed.