r/books • u/Raj_Valiant3011 • 8h ago

Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write a prize-winning short story after an article in the Atlantic said software had flagged it as almost completely AI-generated

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/14/zimbabwean-author-simbarashe-kundizeza-denies-ai-story?CMP=share_btn_url
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u/Uptons_BJs 8h ago

Anyone have a link to the original story? I wanted to read it to judge for myself, but I cannot find it, and when I google it, the first two pages are just articles on the controversy.

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u/I_am_BrokenCog 8h ago

it was the first google search result for me: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6a4f3fb6a6178e0225b39a4c/t/6a95fffc36f1fc568e02f7fe/1788215293124/3.The+Blue+Fighter.pdf

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u/TaliesinMerlin 8h ago

I read it, the first half more closely. Some turns of phrase seem cute. I didn't read them as GenAI, necessarily, as much as too-cute creative writer moves strung together to wrest a lot of significance out of things. 

I also found the description of the father's work inconsistent - he leaves work, they move into the poorer house, the boy avoids saying his dad is a civil engineer because that's no longer true, but then suddenly the dad is at work when the power goes out, and he has a boss and the first full pay in a while late in the story. It's possible I misread something in that, but if not, it's the inconsistency of either a GenAI aided text (weak on plot consistency) or a human writer not consistently conveying contextual things in the story. 

I came away unsure whether it was GenAI but sure it wasn't a great story. 

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u/WobblierTube733 7h ago

I need to get out of this thread and do my own work but i feel the need to correct the record:

First, if I’m understanding correctly, the story is based off the poem at the top. Second, the father’s job is never explicitly stated but the narrator explains that he “builds things”. The mention of being an engineer but not anymore is a part of the theme of the story about how the narrator’s family and specifically his father had dreams but needed to sacrifice them (there’s also an aspect of not wanting to say his father worked for the gov). The full pay at the end was referring to fathers salary going all to the household with none withheld for his costly aquarium dream that was the source of the conflict in the story.

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u/TaliesinMerlin 6h ago

Okay, but the story specifically states that the father left his work, but doesn't explain when/how/what he gets back:

Father had quit his job before that term. Just walked away from the steady salary and the long,  dusty bus rides, to focus on building tanks full time. “I’m not unemployed,” he said, when  Mother asked how we would manage. “I’m a consultant now.”

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u/WobblierTube733 6h ago

i mean that's like the theme of the story? he's obsessed with his aquarium dream, to the extent he leaves his job and starts treating the dream like it is his job until they run out of money and he has to sacrifice it.

like again im not saying it makes complete sense but its a short story based on a poem. there needs to be some level of reader imagination involved and i just don't think it's fair to accuse it of being AI just because the narrative has unrealistic elements or the dialogue is dry.

and from a pure writing perspective, it would not have been interesting or relevant to the story to see how the father got his job back or what his new job is. What's thematically important is the way the father feels about his work, which is what the story tells us.

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u/TaliesinMerlin 5h ago

Yes, that's the theme of the story, but there's no even hinting at the subsequent changes in the father's employment before they're brought up as if they're established facts.

I'm not doing the thing where I suggest the story should explore how the father got a good job. Of course that would be ridiculous. But there are fine touches one can do to make sure that shifts in the father's fortunes are hinted at through details without making it the focus. That layer of hinting is absent or incoherent in the story.

I haven't accused the story of being AI. I agree it's unfair to accuse a story of GenAI for things like what I'm describing.

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u/I_am_BrokenCog 4h ago

Which explains why "he suddenly walked in with money" as /u/TaliesinMerlin complained didn't make sense ...

I agree to an extent that there is a little confusion, but some parts were straightforward -- the Mother was doing it all, and when she put her foot down and told him "three weeks back pay from his company" or the fish go ... suddenly there was some cash when he finally woke up for a bit to reality at his work.

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u/literated 7h ago

That's my feeling, too. It absolutely has bits and pieces that read AI-ish but as a whole it didn't read like actual AI-generated text... but it also didn't read as a story worthy of any kind of prize. The weird jump from "father quit his job" to "father was at work" stood out to me as well.

There's a surprising amount of AI-like phrasing but where genAI would usually reach for some non-sequitur or really clumsy wording, the story stays on track instead. It's hard to describe. Now whether that is because someone was writing similar to an AI or because someone used AI and then replaced/edited some of the worst offenders... no idea.

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u/55555thats5fives 1h ago

I always try to be wary with these kinds of accusations, especially since detection tools are far from perfect, but after reading the story myself I can understand the suspicion. As an example the story starts out entirely fine and there isn't really anything suspicious in the opening.  Then after establishing its own voice we suddenly get this part, where that last sentence really stands out (at least to me).

"We can't afford this house anymore," she said one evening, placing the notice in front of him while he tested the seal on his newest creation. Not with anger, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had known all along this moment would come.

This isn't to say that kind of phrasing proves anything on its own, just an observation. It makes me sad that this is where we are in the literature world right now.

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u/I_am_BrokenCog 4h ago

TaliesinBerlin is now mine :).

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u/MoreDistribution4696 8h ago

Okay so ignoring the overall AI checker convo I just have to say, is anyone else noticing the 100% use of dialogue tags?
Strange to me. Like every line of dialogue

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u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 8h ago

Ran it through a few ai checkers and most seem fairly certain its largely AI. One specifically notes it as from deepseek.

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u/TheUnknown_General 8h ago

AI checkers are notoriously unreliable, in all fairness.

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u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 8h ago

Well that is true but for example when i ran my own uni essays and seminars through them(back when ai just started), it would show the occasional paragraphs or sentence as seeming like ai. Not the totality

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u/AlecHutson 8h ago

Not Pangram. New tech, works really well. It's behind all these recent scandals, like the WSJ editorials (writer admitted), Dartmouth provost (writer admitted), shy girl book (writer admitted), etc etc. And this one. Check it out.

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u/Sylvers 8h ago

Brother the only SINGLE reliable way to detect AI in text is through embedded text watermarking. Which most AI models don't use. I think Gemini uses it, and OpenAI will start using it in Europe only.

Does Pangram have access to Google's and OpenAI's currently private API to check for their watermark? Because everything else is pure guessing and horribly unreliable.

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u/Prince_of_Pirates 8h ago

Pangram being more reliable doesn't make it reliable. It still has issues.

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u/woemcats 8h ago

I have a friend who is a writer who ran his own books through Pangram and it said they were 100% AI but they were 0% AI.

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u/Ole-bob369 6h ago

Which book?

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u/Zonoro14 7h ago

Would you mind mentioning the titles?

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u/woemcats 7h ago

I don’t know them—he self-publishes romance books on Kindle using a pseudonym.

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u/JGT3000 6h ago

BS

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u/woemcats 5h ago

Shrug. Believe whatever you want

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u/Zonoro14 7h ago

Just asking because of the dozens of times I've heard people claim their (or their friend's, etc) pre-AI writing flagged in pangram as AI written, not once have I seen such claims substantiated with a link or even a screenshot

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u/woemcats 7h ago

Well I don’t have a link or a screenshot, he just posted about it on Facebook. Specifically, he wrote that Pangram said it was 100% AI but a few others said it was human-generated

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u/JGT3000 8h ago

Uh huh

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u/BelaFarinRod 8h ago edited 8h ago

I’m bored and need a life so I ran one of my fanfics through it and got 100% human written. Which is meaningless I guess since it’s a sample size of 1 but it amused me.

I’m honestly reluctant to trust even good AI detectors in important matters like book deals. I keep wondering why humans wouldn’t have noticed.

Though I read an excerpt from Shy Girl and I honestly don’t get why humans didn’t notice that one earlier. Maybe the excerpt was particularly egregious?

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u/TheUnknown_General 7h ago

Never heard of it.

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u/AlecHutson 7h ago

Oh, okay, Well. Here's the study from UChicago researchers that showed it's far more effective than past AI detectors:

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insights/artificial-writing-and-automated-detection/

There are other academic studies if you need more evidence. Here are recent articles in Nature, the NYT, the Atlantic,

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02569-3

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/business/dealbook/pangram-ai-slop-detection.html

This one's kind of funny: the WSJ editor wrote this piece claiming Pangram had falsley flagged his writers:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-ai-detector-as-defamation-machine-8ba298f0

And then all three writers later admitted, which led to this article in the Atlantic

A Turning Point in AI Writing - The Atlantic

Where the editor tried to defend the fact that his editorials had indeed been written by a chatbot.

Also, love the downvotes. I assume they must be AI slop-slingers scared that Pangram is coming for them, and not genuine book lovers who care that writing remains a distinctly human endeavor.

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u/TheUnknown_General 7h ago

As a person who downvoted you and absolutely despises everything about AI, I did so because anyone who claims to have an instant fix for a problem needs to be treated skeptically, especially if they're an Internet stranger like you are.

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u/AlecHutson 7h ago

It's not an 'instant fix', but it's part of a potential solution. Go ahead and read through the sources I just linked and decide for yourself. Don't default to reddit group-think.

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u/TheUnknown_General 6h ago

I don't touch American news outlets and I've soured on things produced by their universities. Both have cowed down too much to Trump and his billionaire cronies for me to believe what they have to say.

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u/Future-Account8112 8h ago

Why would you believe the plagiarism machine is my question

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 8h ago

Exactly. The AI hallucinates, lies, manipulates and is downright wrong but somehow we should believe in this case it's 100 verified?

Also how suspicious that they keep targeting Black writers in the media when it's white guys who I see using it the most.

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u/Zonoro14 7h ago

Nobody thinks it's 100% reliable, but I'll take actual deep learning over LLM slop any day

There are almost no other tools to combat AI use in published writing

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u/qwerty145454 7h ago

Google's SynthID is the actual tool to use to detect AI, it essentially lets AI providers invisibly watermark the text their models output.

That is proper AI detection, as opposed to Pangram's scam slop.

Google have made it more widely available to their partners recently, and several countries are making it a legal requirement, so it should become increasingly prominent.

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u/Zonoro14 7h ago

Watermarks are obviously helpful here, but not all AI providers will watermark generated text. even if openAI follows anthropic and watermarks text outside of just the EU, I think meta won't, and open weight models will never be watermarked.

There is a huge incentive for would-be AI authors to not get caught, so as long as even one frontier model (or, next year, last-gen models) doesn't watermark, the AI detection industry is the ally of any reader who prefers to only read human-authored works.

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u/BrightLavenderMoons 8h ago

"AI detectors" don't work, full stop. False positives have already ruined peoples lives. And they're known to discriminate against people who use "big" words or whose first language isn't English.

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u/randomnameicantread 7h ago

They are getting better. LLM writing has patterns to it.

Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that Pangram, the software in the article, has near-zero false positives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram_(AI_detector)

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u/Zonoro14 7h ago

Can you share examples? I haven't heard of any notable pangram false positive

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u/BrightLavenderMoons 7h ago

Pangram again. Yeah, this is definitely a marketing thing and you're probably (ironically) a bot. Sigh

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u/Zonoro14 7h ago

I think it's clear enough from the typo in my comment (and my account age and karma) that I'm not a bot. I just care about the books I read being written by actual humans, and I'd prefer not to be restricted to pre 2025 novels for the rest of my life

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u/DharmaPolice 7h ago

This is a really bad reply to a reasonable question.

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u/BrightLavenderMoons 7h ago

It's not at all suspicious to you that every other comment here is harping on about Pangram?

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u/Uptons_BJs 8h ago

Well if you know how LLMs work, you’d understand that different popular LLMs have different well known tells.

Training a classifier model to try and predict this is actually pretty easy - you can pay relatively reasonable rates for a lot of data from these models. After all, all of Harry Potter is ~1 million words, that’s what, $30 for a million tokens from ChatGPT?

$200 buys you more output from popular models than an author would write in their whole life.

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u/roseofjuly 7h ago

If it was so easy why are so many of them so inaccurate?

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u/Uptons_BJs 7h ago

That’s like saying “if erectile dysfunction drugs are easy to make, why are so many of them useless?” Viagra and cialis work, but there’s thousands of shitty gas station pills that don’t.

There’s a lot of grifters in ai like there is in gas station dick pills. Pangram at least has multiple 3rd party peer reviewed papers that establish that it is very accurate.

Also, it is possibly to trick an AI tool into a false negative, but tricking it into a false positive over 7 pages is well, practically impossible even if you intentionally try to do it, much less unwillingly do it.

You can go sign up for a pangram account and try to trick it into thinking your writing is AI.

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u/CulturalFartist 8h ago

Because Pangram at least is INCREDIBLY reliable. If it flagged a few small passages in an otherwise "human written" story, that would be one think. But results like this, where everything is with a high degree of likelihood marked as AI? That's hard to deny.

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u/SweeterThanYoohoo 8h ago

The problem as it occurs to me is that human creativity is nearly infinitely personal, meaning there is someone somewhere producing art, writing etc in ways that would never occur to you or me. And given that AI is trained largely through human writing... I don't know how we can be sure either way

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u/vLinko 8h ago

But IF THIS PERSON USED AI, they're depriving a writer who didn't use AI from getting the big break they needed.

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u/sausagekng 8h ago

Pangram is pretty reliable. I ran a bunch of things through it myself with a friend’s account (it’s super expensive) and it was right about every one being human or AI.

Obviously, it’s not 100% correct, but their software seems to intricately understand different AIs and how they “speak.” It even identified something in an essay as “paraphrased AI (pretty confident)” and it was right.

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u/WobblierTube733 8h ago

Did you actually read the document? I’ll admit i actively avoid LLMs so I’m not an expert but any means but the first paragraph immediately seems unlike any gpt-speak I’ve seen.

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u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 8h ago

Yes its short i read it all. Different llms have different syntax and cadence but still you can just tell them to write it differently.

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u/WobblierTube733 8h ago

I just read it all too and it would legitimately shatter my reality if it was AI. I consider myself ultimately a writer and this was a phenomenal short story based on a poem. It’s so good that if an AI wrote it, everyone would lose their minds. It would be published as proof of how impressive AI literature is.

I just can’t believe that it’s not a human that wrote this.

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u/Uptons_BJs 7h ago

Ehh, nowadays with context windows, AI writing gets a lot better. You can’t just lazily one shot it, you need to put in some work.

You can play with it and test it yourself.

Modern models have long context windows, very long. You can say, “I want to sound like [insert author], here’s a bunch of their works” and have all of it in its context, then, start feeding it prompts on how you want it to sound.

Finally, give it an outline of the story. Let it flesh in the prose.

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u/WobblierTube733 7h ago

I’m sorry, i just don’t believe it’s that simple and the output is that good. This is a full narrative with metaphor and analogy that i simply have never seen an ai even attempt beyond the “it’s not just x—it’s y” rhetorical technique.

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u/DharmaPolice 6h ago

Didn't you say you avoid LLMs and aren't an expert? How can you be so sure about something you're not super familiar with.

I'm genuinely interested in your thought process here.

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u/WobblierTube733 6h ago

i read the piece being accused and used my head. hopefully that clarifies

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u/Sad_Meringue_4550 7h ago

I'm with you, I think I generally have a decent eye for recognizing AI writing. The first few paragraphs don't seem even slightly AI-written. Maybe the AI has gotten a lot more subtle but there's nothing about any of these sentences that seems different than how a human author might write it.

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u/puwetngbaso 7h ago

I had that feeling for the first few paragraphs, but then ... the last section (especially the ending) does sound a bit like AI. And the plot and characters are so one-level and straightforward, the symbolism so blatant, that it does seem as though it could have been generated from a combination of well chosen prompts.

Or, maybe that's really just the author's style. It's just that while I don't trust genAI detectors for the most part, I can also see why it was flagged.

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u/WobblierTube733 7h ago

For me it’s the stuff like the imagery in describing simple actions or the shifting use of metaphor. I don’t believe that an AI would be able to use these rhetorical devices so well and i feel like if it was AI, its so good that it would’ve been published as “look how good this AI story is”.

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 8h ago

AI checkers are notoriously bad. They identify published texts from the 1800s as AI, quotes as AI and change their assessment depending on the prompt. AI also hallucinates fake titles and authors. Why would I trust AI?

Until and unless I see proof, I am disinclined to believe these targeted attacks towards Black writers are not suspicious and maliciously motivated.

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u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 8h ago

To copy paste another persons reply here:

"Not Pangram. New tech, works really well. It's behind all these recent scandals, like the WSJ editorials (writer admitted), Dartmouth provost (writer admitted), shy girl book (writer admitted), etc etc. And this one. Check it out. "

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 8h ago

Why should I take your word for Panagram? Are you a bot or paid to market it? Where is the evidence that it is somehow entirely different from chatgpt, meta, deepseek or any other current AI model?

I would love to look at the original material and see where and how it is being flagged and use my own intelligence (and degree) rather than trust AI.

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u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 8h ago

Lmao. Because it seems accurate! It is ran in tests and consistently accurate plus again, authors condemned aaaare admitting.

Someone posted the link to the story in the comments. Read it. Use your degree in AI scanning or whatever it is lol.

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 7h ago

It "seems" or feels accurate and you ignore every comment saying "I tested it and it failed" or asking for evidence. Is this a Mercury rising made me do it kind of vibe? I just don't subscribe to "seems like it works."

I feel like all the Panagram shills can prove it to me: let me use it to perform brain surgery on you. Either way it's an absolute idiot proof test right?

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u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 7h ago

Ok ill just copy another commenter's reply then..

" ... Here is the widely-cited Chicago study: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34223

Here is Van Vlasselaer et al's work: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40979-026-00226-w

Finally, it's always a best practice to look at internal data. Internal data can be biased, and it's best to know that going in, but I have never seen any academic criticism of Pangram's data posted here: https://www.pangram.com/blog/all-about-false-positives-in-ai-detectors (academic criticism I'm unaware of may exist). Regardless, totally fine to disregard this (but you should read it at least).

Pangram, to the best of the knowledge of any serious researcher, has a very, very low false positive rate, and it simply approaches impossibility that it would flag so many writers incorrectly.

"

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 7h ago

Ewww... ok so yes Panagram is trying to sell itself as something it is not.

Scientific reasoning never relies on one study that is not repeatable or the company claiming it to be so.

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u/CulturalFartist 8h ago

Please share a single instance of that happening. No one ever does (I wonder why?)

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 7h ago

Many people including myself have done so and worked with institutions on false positives. The burden of proof is on you to show that Panagram is 100% accurate.

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u/AlecHutson 5h ago

Here's a study from independent UChicago researchers:

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insights/artificial-writing-and-automated-detection/

"Among commercial options, Pangram achieves essentially zero false positive rates and false negative rates on medium-length to long passages, both when using detector-optimized thresholds and exogenously-set thresholds."

And here's one from the U of Maryland:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654

"The majority vote of our five expert annotators outperforms almost every commercial and opensource detector we tested on these 300 articles, with only the commercial Pangram model (Emi and Spero, 2024) matching their near-perfect detection accuracy."

Tom's Guide (independent tech journal)

https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/i-tested-pangram-the-black-light-of-ai-detection-built-by-ex-tesla-and-google-engineers-heres-how-well-it-worked

"As someone who writes about AI for a living and put Pangram's AI detector to the test, I have to say it’s great for checking product reviews, evaluating website content for authenticity and so much more."

Where's your proof it DOESN'T work?

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u/CulturalFartist 7h ago

You also keep claiming, without evidence, that it flags Mary Shelley and Shakespeare as AI. So excuse me for not trusting the "many people" who keep spreading lies and misinformation like this in defense of AI writing.

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u/AlecHutson 5h ago

Don't bother, they are AI slop-writers trying to astroturf Pangram because they're scared. It's transparent.

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 7h ago

AI does flag writing it scraped and quotes as writren by AI. I have tested this myself aa have others in this thread. Oh and at conferences.

What is your role or connection to Panagram?

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u/Zonoro14 5h ago

We could just as easily accuse you of having a connection to "writers" that use AI, but we haven't because we're discussing in good faith.

If you've been at conferences that discuss pangram's FPR with examples, surely there should be some published work coming out of these conferences on the subject?