Letter from a Reader 7.7.26
An AI scandal hits Harper's Bazaar and prize-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki, H.L. Mencken on why writers write, and: Is Thomas the Tank Engine 'imperialist'?
It’s a mystery Agatha Christie might have relished. Who—or what—wrote the latest winner of an annual short story contest run by Harper’s Bazaar U.K. and claimed its prize of two nights at a hotel on the island that inspired Christie’s And Then There Were None?
Readers noted that Pangram flagged the winning story as 100% AI-generated soon after the magazine posted it last month. Even if they hadn’t, you might have had your own suspicions about “Back and Forth,” published under the byline of “Kavyta Kay.”
The six-member judging panel included Harper’s Bazaar staff and the Women’s Prize–winning novelist Ruth Ozeki, none of whom appears to have commented publicly on reports that the author used an artificial-intelligence tool to write the story. When the magazine posted “Back and Forth” in June, Ozeki said it evokes “two parallel worlds—two trees, two times, two countries, two cultures and two opposing sets of human values.”
What Ozeki didn’t say is that “Back and Forth” is what you might get if you asked Claude or ChatGPT for a 1500-word story about the experiences of a female protagonist as an adolescent in Mauritius in 1999 and an adult in London in 2026. It melds New Age clichés and postcolonial-studies tropes in a slick but flat and schematic story. “Back and Forth” signals its tone in the first line: “The tree knew before she did—and it waited.” It might appeal only if you like talking to friends about the wisdom of trees more than, say, the wisdom of an op-ed or a Claire Keegan novel.
All of this raises disturbing questions about a contest run by a publication owned by Hearst Communications, a global media organization that owns not just newspapers and magazines like Cosmopolitan but a 20% stake in the ESPN television network.