The burden of human authorship in the age of ChatGPT

MANILA, Philippines – Exploring authorship in the age of AI and ChatGPT.

The F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Award, first launched in 2015,  recently opened submissions to this year’s literary competition. Filipino writers are encouraged to submit short stories in English or Filipino by August 15, and the winning entry in each language category will receive the top prize of ₱25,000.

What caught my attention is a new provision in this year’s contest with respect to artificial intelligence or AI. As stated by the organizers:

To protect the integrity of the competition, the organizers reserve the right to request drafts, revision histories, research notes, or other evidence of authorship. Entries for which satisfactory evidence of predominantly human authorship cannot be provided including those suspected of undisclosed generative AI authorship, may be disqualified.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time the competition has issued guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in the writing process.

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AI slop has flooded the literary world

Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, the literary world has been flooded with people hoping to make a quick buck with AI-generated texts.

The 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize was recently embroiled in an AI-authorship controversy when the winning entry, “The Serpent in the Grove” by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad and Tobago, was suspected to be written by AI after being selected to win a total prize of £5,000 (approximately ₱415,000).

In analyzing Nazir’s story, American writer Lincoln Michel highlighted several of the short story’s nonsensical metaphors, including “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink” and “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.”

Aside from Nazir, two of the other four regional winners, “The Bastion’s Shadow”, by John Edward DeMicoli of Malta, and “Mehendi Nights”, by Indian writer Sharon Aruparayil, were also accused of being AI-generated.

In March, a New York Times story alleged that American author Mia Ballard used AI to write her 2025 self-published novel Shy Girl. The controversy prompted publisher Hachette to cancel the book’s launch in the United States.

And just months after ChatGPT was first released, renowned science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld was forced to temporarily halt submissions due to a deluge of what founder and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke said were cases of plagiarism and chatbot-generated stories. Before November 2022, Clarkesworld typically rejected fewer than 25 entries in any given month; that number skyrocketed to over 500 in February 2023.

Clarkesworld’s problem wasn’t simply that AI-generated slop was being submitted. Its editors suddenly had to spend too much time filtering low-quality entries, thereby making it harder to discover genuine literary gems.

The rise of AI chatbots and LLMs has upended nearly every creative industry around the world. Many readers are refusing to read anything that looks like it was generated by AI. And people are already using the new internet slang “ai;dr” or “AI; didn’t read” (modeled after “tl;dr” or “too long; didn’t read”) as a response to perceived AI slop.

Is there a place for AI?

Interestingly, the organizers of the F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Award appear to allow some uses of AI when they mentioned “predominantly human authorship” and “undisclosed generative Al authorship” in their AI provision. 

I guess a distinction needs to be made between an AI-assisted writing process and AI-generated text. The organizers likely consider that using large language models or LLMs to do copyediting, spellchecking, and translation is acceptable. Beyond that, it remains unclear whether chatbots can be used in creating plot outlines, brainstorming dialogues, or writing entire paragraphs. Certainly using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to create the whole short story is unacceptable.

I also commend the organizers for assuming good faith that writers will generally avoid heavy uses of AI and that they would only require proof of human authorship when questions arise.

The F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Award is far from being the first organization to grapple with navigating the current world of AI chatbots. Their nuanced approach to artificial intelligence—not outright banning all use of it—is likely the pragmatic approach.

Ultimately, the challenge for literary publishers and writing contest organizers is not simply a question of where to draw the line on acceptable uses of LLM technology. It is in recognizing talent and valuing human creativity, especially in a world where AI tools are here to stay.

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