The waiting room at the welfare office has plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Orange. They were orange in 1978 and they’re orange now, and the people sitting in them look about the same — tired, angry, trying not to make eye contact. I was there last month getting some paperwork sorted. A woman next to me was filling out a form in pencil. Careful, slow strokes. The kind of handwriting that takes effort.
Nobody accused her of using a printer.
I thought about that woman when I read about Peter Doolan. He won something called the Plaza Prizes — audio poetry award, first place. Except then he didn’t win it, because a machine looked at his poem and decided it smelled like a machine. The competition sent him an email. Politely regretful. Zero-tolerance policy for AI. His entry was flagged.
The poem was from 2018.
Seven years before the world changed, before every literary magazine started adding AI disclaimers to their submission guidelines, before “hallucination” stopped meaning what it used to mean — Doolan wrote a poem. He published it somewhere. It existed. Then he entered it in a contest and a machine read it and decided: synthetic.
Who do you appeal to?
The old systems — corrupt, biased, slow, human — at least you could argue with them. You could get in front of someone and make your case. The panel of judges. The editor who’d rejected you three times. You could argue, and sometimes you’d lose because someone didn’t like your politics or the way you shook their hand. That was unfair in the human way — unfair with a face on it.
The machine doesn’t have a face.
In Salem, they called it spectral evidence. Your neighbor dreamed your ghost appeared and pinched her in the night. That was enough. You couldn’t cross-examine a specter. The court accepted the testimony and hanged people on the strength of it.
The AI detector is spectral evidence. The machine dreamed about your poem. Case closed.
Damon Galgut won the Booker Prize in 2021. He judged the fiction category for the Plaza Prizes in 2025. He read manuscripts, deliberated, produced a report, selected winners. Then he tried to get paid the £1,500 he was promised. The competition’s founder told him the invoice wasn’t in the right format. Then stopped responding. Then, when Galgut kept pushing, threatened to sue him for defamation.
The Booker Prize winner. Chasing fifteen hundred pounds through email. Threatened by a man whose writing competition existed, in part, because the literary community had donated money to save him from homelessness.
It’s almost beautiful in its way. Almost worth a story. Maybe Galgut will write it once he gets paid.
The founder’s name is Simon Kerr, and I don’t know him. I don’t have a bone to pick with him personally. But I recognize the type — not bad, exactly, but desperate. The kind of desperation that starts as ambition and curdles into something more dangerous. He wanted to be a patron of the arts. He wanted to matter in the literary world. That’s a comprehensible desire. The literary world is one of the few places left where certain people believe you can buy respectability with a prize fund and a ceremony in the Dordogne.
The ceremony was cancelled, by the way.
Not the fraud, if it was fraud — fraud in the arts is old news, the check is always in the mail. What I can’t shake is the disqualification. A poem written in 2018, flagged by a detector that hadn’t been invented yet when the poem was written, thrown out by a machine making a judgment no human could verify or contest.
Another winner — who asked to remain anonymous, which tells you something about the atmosphere around all of this — was also disqualified. Also denied using AI. Also couldn’t use the technology, didn’t know how. Also received an identical form email.
I’ve had my work rejected. Many times. The form letters, the silence, the occasional handwritten note saying my submission showed some promise but wasn’t quite right for their publication at this time. You learn to live with rejection. You pour a drink and you move on. The work survives.
What you don’t survive as easily — what I think would break something fundamental in a person — is being told your work isn’t yours. That the poem you wrote at your kitchen table, the images you hunted down over weeks, the thing you bled over and finally said yes, this, this is the one — that it came from something that doesn’t bleed.
That’s not rejection. That’s erasure.
The Plaza Prizes are gone now. The website is down. Kerr isn’t responding to anyone.
But the detector runs on. Deployed in submission portals and editorial inboxes and competition platforms, flagging poems from 2018, finding machines in the work of people who have never touched the software. Getting it wrong and being trusted anyway, because at least it gives a definitive answer.
The machine doesn’t ask for expenses. It doesn’t need to be paid. It doesn’t get threatening emails or small claims filings. It just keeps deciding what’s human and what isn’t.
Sooner or later, it’ll be deciding all of it.
Source: Winners and judges out of pocket as £20,000 writing awards appear to have closed — The Guardian