Eisteddfod row: the curious case of the AI novel that wasn’t

Desmond Clifford

All the best eisteddfods have a row. Like football, eisteddfods arouse passion precisely because, in the end, no one gets killed. Even so, the rows often point to larger matters.

Among the Eisteddfod’s competitions is the “Daniel Owen Prize”, awarded for the best unpublished novel, at least 50,000 words in length. It was won by Rebecca Thomas for her work “Ynys Gwales”.

Her previous book,“Y Twr”, is a university satire, though hardly less bizarre than the reality of Welsh universities just now. I enjoyed it very much and I look forward to her new one.

The Eisteddfod format invites the chair of the judging panel to take the stage and read an adjudication of the entries. This usually describes the general standard of entries, perhaps commending a couple for special merit and narrowly missing out.

The adjudication will describe how some entries failed to meet the standard in various ways, offering some practical pointers for future work. They will finish with praise for the winning entry.

Occasionally, but it does happen, a prize is withheld when the judges feel no entries meet the expected standard. This is met with disappointment but understanding from eisteddfodwyr; maintaining standards is an important aspect of the competition.

The entries are anonymous and the judges don’t know their identities. Only the winner’s real name is revealed at the ceremony; the other entrants remain anonymous permanently.

At the adjudication in Aberteifi, the chair of the judges, Meinir Wyn Edwards, described one entry as “almost impossible to read”. She said the novel was so poor and unedited that the judges suspected an AI machine may have produced the piece.

That might have been that, except that the novel’s author, Romy Wood, surrendered her anonymity and contacted the BBC. She is a Welsh learner and this was her first attempt at the Eisteddfod competition.

She was “devastated” by the criticism and felt she was the butt of sarcasm and laughter. “Like all writers”, she said, “I’m very nervous about my work.”

The adjudicators responded that they were sorry to have caused distress and expressed support for learners nurturing their craft. Nic Parry, the Eisteddfod’s President – and a former High Court judge – gave robust support to the judges. He told S4C, quite sternly I thought, that the judges had been wronged and that it was their duty to express their independent opinion.

What to make of all this?

I appreciate the Eisteddfod tradition though I’m not mad keen, personally, on literary competitions. Prize-winning just never seems to me the right way to approach reading. Apart from anything else, they just aren’t a very reliable guide. Kingsley Amis won the Booker Prize in 1986 with “The Old Devils”, one of the worst books ever. Scandalously, it beat “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “An Artist of the Floating World” by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ve never taken the Booker seriously since.

The Eisteddfod isn’t the Booker Prize, but it’s the same principle. A prize might draw your attention to a work but shouldn’t replace your own judgement.

That said, if you choose to enter a competition you must accept its rules and traditions. For the Eisteddfod, the adjudication from the stage is integral. Bluntly, you must take it or leave it. In this instance, the offended author chose to reveal herself and share her upset publicly, in order to clarity that she is, in fact, a person and not a bot. In fairness, quite a lot of websites now ask you that very question: “Are you a robot?”

Judgement

Anyone who writes fears judgement. Even nation.cymru columnists get it in the neck (the most online abuse I ever had was, unexpectedly, for writing about Shakespeare’s connections with Wales!).

Writing is like politics or Welsh rugby; everyone has an opinion – and that’s really the point of it. Even the best writers worry about the response to their next work. Imagine how Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro felt losing out to useless Kingsley Amis.

Ideally, a creative person should have thick skin, though the fact that most don’t is partly why they’re so creative.

Writers need a well-developed critical sense. No one has full objectivity about themselves and that’s one reason why editors exist. They provide filtration. Someone other than the writer is deciding whether or not a piece merits publication and in what form.

Eisteddfod competitions have rules and traditions and any potential competitor is responsible for checking them first. The competitions shouldn’t be feared, but must be respected. A basic familiarity indicates that adjudication is part of the Eisteddfod tradition. The judges are expected to speak honestly.
Writing anything well is difficult. Doing so in a learned language is immense. People do it, some extremely well, and I raise my hat to them.

Realistic

I’ve spoken Welsh through my adult life, not far off 50 years now (yikes!) but I would struggle to compose 500 words of literate, correct and readable Welsh. The thought of writing a novel of 50,000 words – well, I could as easily jog up Mount Everest.

I don’t argue that people shouldn’t do it. I do argue that writers should be realistic about where they sit on the language trajectory. Start with a short story perhaps, or an article, and build from there? Most of us just aren’t Joseph Conrad (for whom English, astonishingly, was his third language).

I am on the side of writers. It’s a difficult and lonely calling. If you produce anything half decent or interesting, it will still struggle to see the light of day and even then, most likely, only a tiny number of people will read it.

Success, if measured in a commercial sense, is an exception not the rule. You have to believe in what you’re doing otherwise you’d give up on day one.

A word of solidarity for the judges. To my ears the adjudication wasn’t over-the-top or outside the bounds of Eisteddfod tradition. I’ve heard much worse from the stage. I recall hearing the late Gerallt Lloyd Owen adjudicating much more spikily some years back, and I don’t recall complaints about it.

Having agreed to perform the function, judges have a duty to the spirit of the Eisteddfod competition. They also have a wider, unwritten duty.

The Eisteddfod in many ways sets the standard for Welsh writing generally. This sounds a bit pompous but is really quite important. If written Welsh is not to become flaky or degraded, its written standards need to be upheld and protected. If the Eisteddfod doesn’t do that, who else will or can?

This isn’t a spurious argument about cultural purity; it’s about respecting correct use of the language in our national life. I refer back to Rebecca Thomas’s novel “Y Twr”. It could serve as a model for any author. It’s not difficult to read. Every word is in common usage; there is no unnecessary obscurity. Each sentence is simple and rationally structured, and makes full sense. Every paragraph has a function leading us to the end point of the story – in this case, the top of a tower block.

AI

This won’t be the last we hear of AI at the Eisteddfod. A couple of years back I visited the Barcelona Super Computer. Among other things, it stores more words of Welsh – millions of them – than anywhere else in the world outside the National Library.

Its Large Language Model could probably already churn out a new novel by Daniel Owen himself, and you’d be hard put to spot the difference. And if we’re not there yet, it’s only a matter of time. There’s no point burying heads in sand over this.

I see the Eisteddfod is discussing, in the light of this year’s row, and others from previous years, whether to deploy a “sensitivity reader”.

They would be mad to proceed with this ludicrous idea. It would kill the Eisteddfod and turn it into an organised censorship contest. No self-respecting writer would collude with those conditions.

Writers must write what they will and their work must be judged accordingly. Once authors start trimming and tacking to meet the needs of some supposed expert (who, how…?) the whole enterprise is doomed. “I’m sorry Mr ap Gwliym, but Dyddgu is being objectified here and the Eisteddfod respectfully requests…”. Seriously?

The future of writing

The bigger issue is AI. Even now, I wonder how schools and colleges are coping? I can’t believe AI isn’t widely used all over the place. It has real implications for the future of writing.

I worked at the Welsh Government for thirty years and I noted the average quality of writing declining steadily throughout that time. Where will we be when AI does it all, if it isn’t already?

Good writers need good readers – and I’m more concerned for the future of Welsh reading than Welsh writing. There’s already a crisis in non-fiction writing. The podcast is killing it.

These are the bigger questions the Eisteddfod should be concerned with: the inevitable challenge of AI and the future of literacy.

They should be working with the Welsh Government, publishers and others to help sustain a literate environment without which all Welsh writing is ultimately doomed.

Desmond Clifford is Books Editor of Nation.Cymru

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