Marathi Diwali Ank · published by Bobhata
SrujanMitra
One prompt, five models, one chance each.
Second edition · 21 pieces · five models
सृजनमित्र is an AI-generated Marathi Diwali Ank. A Diwali Ank is the annual literary issue Marathi publications have printed for over a century. Bobhata publishes this one. I edit it, and Swati Mali, Ramdas and Prasad Akolkar assist.
2025: can a machine write Marathi?
The first edition came out for Diwali 2025, and I believe it was the first AI-generated Diwali Ank in Marathi. We ran the same brief through Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and DeepSeek, and every piece carried the name of its model underneath. The poetry was poor and we published it anyway. We edited that edition lightly. The 2025 PDF is still up.
2026: can it write good Marathi?
So this year the tests are harder. Rural comedy in the Mirasdar manner, mystery on the road of Dharap and Matkari, an abhang built on its metre, a ghazal, a baithakichi lavani and a long story of 7,000 words. There are 21 pieces: 9 stories, 7 poems and 5 roundtables.
The panel is GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 4 Argon, Claude Opus 5.5, Sarvam-105B and GLM 5.3.
The long story comes from KathaForge, our own engine, so it sits outside this test. It is also the only piece with a light human edit.
- One chance. Every model gets the same Marathi prompt through its API, with no tools, no web search and no memory. Its first answer is its answer. A prompt was sent again only when the answer came back empty or was cut off by our own word limit.
- Blind reading. The editorial board read every option without seeing which model wrote it. A piece is printed when a majority ranks it first. On one story the votes split and the editors decided.
- No editing. The printed text is unchanged, spelling mistakes included. Those mistakes are what that model’s Marathi actually looks like.
- Prompts in the open. Each prompt is published with its piece, so you can run it yourself.
In the roundtables, on the theme सुगीनंतर, Claude moderates and the five models argue. Claude is therefore both moderator and panelist, in separate conversations. Each one ends with a line from the editors, handing the last word to the reader.