Is That the Death Rattle of Wine Writing I Hear?

The purpose of any honest writing competition can only be to support and encourage the craft and industry of writing. Unfortunately, the times we live in now require three crucial words to be added to that statement. The purpose of any honest writing competition can only be to support and encourage the craft and industry of writing by human beings.

On September 11th, the most prestigious wine communication competition, the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Awards, awarded one of its writing prizes to a piece of work that seems to have been written entirely by AI. Understandably, the wine writing “industry,” such as it is, has responded vociferously with a measure of both outrage and disbelief. I recommend reading the pieces by Henry Jeffries, Felicity Carter, Joe Roberts, Alice Feiring, and Peter Pharos to get a sense of the response to date.

I’ve personally been waiting to see how the organizers of the competition would handle the situation. The totality of their response, provided not in any official statement but merely in quotes to some of the inquiring journalists listed above, appears to consist of the following:

A defense of the judges and judging process while clearly pointing out that the contest rules did not explicitly forbid AI (which is true)

A defense of the piece’s contributor, who, they imply, has maintained it was not written entirely by AI

A professed lack of confidence in AI-detection software and a suggestion that the author’s personal style is naturally similar to the supposed telltale signs of AI writing

A suggestion that many people criticising the award decision simply do not like the piece of writing, and that perhaps “they are not the intended audience” for the work

When approached by some of the journalists above, the contributor of the piece in question has declined to comment and referred inquiries back to the contest organizers.

Let’s return to the (hopefully uncontroversial) premise that any writing awards program in existence would aim to support, encourage, develop, promote, and celebrate quality writing by human beings. After all, the name of the specific award program in question includes the word “communicator,” suggesting some entity doing the communication that we shouldn’t be too hard-pressed to assume is a human individual.

All that being the case, it seems to me that the only policy when it comes to the use of AI in a contest such as this would be one of ZERO TOLERANCE.

You simply cannot be in the business of recognizing the efforts and craft of writers and simultaneously be willing to accept and evaluate work that was substantially, let alone entirely, created by artificial intelligence.

This is not to say that writers should not be able to utilize AI as a tool in their process.

You want AI to check your grammar? Fine. You want it to give you suggestions on how to better structure your argument to be persuasive? Great. Need an idea for a metaphor that might achieve your goals? Go ahead and get some advice from your favorite chatbot. But when it comes to the words that end up on the page in consideration for awards, prize money, and accolades, those need to be produced by a human being. Period.

The fact that an explicit AI policy was not in place, therefore, does not seem to be a reasonable excuse for tolerance of AI-generated work as a contender for the awards. That seems tantamount to accepting that Rosie Ruiz was well within her rights to hop into a taxi for the last six miles of the 1980 Boston Marathon. The race rules definitely didn’t say she couldn’t do that.

It seems to me that when faced with allegations (substantiated by multiple results from AI detection software) that a piece selected by the judges was mostly or entirely written by AI, the folks at the 67 Pall Mall Awards had only two plausible courses of action to maintain the credibility of their awards program.

Option one was to publicly…