The organizing committee of the Voloshinsky competition commented on the scandal with the disqualification of the winner for the use of AI

But first, let us explain that Korovin announced the disqualification of the laureate for neuronka on Wednesday, November 11, speaking from the stage of the Bulgakov House, where the evening of the Voloshinsky competition and festival of 2026 took place. But then nobody expected the situation to attract the attention of the media, including the federal ones. However, after a post in social networks Ivan Rodionov, automatically recognized as the winner, the author of an essay about the young poet Elena Zhambalova, who died suddenly in the summer of 2025, the situation received wide publicity. “Otherwise, thinking hardware,” Rodionov wrote emotionally, who agreed in an interview with our correspondent with the idea that the editorial staff of literary magazines and the jury of competitions will inevitably be flooded with AI fakes.

“How to cut it off is unclear. With poetry and prose it is easier – if not with the detection of neurotrace, then at least at the level of editorial taste. And non-artistic, deliberately smooth in tone or near-academic, how to recognize? says Rodionov.

We did not expect AI to burst into the literary process so swiftly and brazenly. All right, books written with the help of artificial intelligence – at least they pay money for them. And we have cashless prizes. Who knew that someone would cheat for the sake of publishing in an electronic journal, Korovin said.

He explained that the “fake” text sent to the contest alerted him immediately, but none of the jury members initially expressed doubts, so the chairman of the organizing committee “shelved his fears”:

Everything was strange: the application, the identity of the author, and the writers whose works the contestant referred to. I should have trusted my inner intuition right away, but the urgency and fuss of it dampened it.

- Andrey Yurievich, is it not stipulated in the conditions of the competition that it is possible to submit only with "human" works?

The regulations state that only living authors can participate. Is AI who or what? However, in the future, we will be leaving more time and tasking experts and jury members with verifying dubious works.

What are the AI Checking Tools? Are they effective?

There are free and paid services for checking texts for AI - they are used in universities, in the media, where originality of the text is required.

Do you think that Russian and world literary criticism will one day be divided into “before” and “after” the era of neural networks?

There will be a period of chaos until there are clear separators for AI-text and Human-text. Now the author’s background is very important – unique texts are not taken from nowhere. Although AI has learned to analyze perfectly, its analysis differs from human analysis in many ways that are well known to professionals.