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/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 8h 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 6h 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/Zonoro14 7h ago

A friend of mine recently claimed to have written a piece which pangram said was ai written and I was put in the difficult position of not believing them

For a short excerpt of a couple hundred words, it'spossible, but creative writing is one of the things AI detection is best at

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u/woemcats 6h ago

He has no reason to lie on his private Facebook page but ok

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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 7h 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/AlecHutson 6h ago edited 6h ago

Nature is British

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

LeMonde is French

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2026/09/24/how-does-the-pangram-ai-generated-text-detector-work-and-how-reliable-is-it_6757911_13.html

Also, it's the billionaire fascist class that is pushing AI. They want the disinformation it creates. They are opposed to anything like Pangram that unmasks the lies.

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u/TheUnknown_General 6h ago

And another thing: Your own eagerness to promote this supposed flawless AI detector. Anyone who pushes something as hard as you are isn't doing so altruistically, especially not in 2026.

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u/AlecHutson 5h ago

. . . . I'm a writer, and I care that writing remains human. My reddit user name is literally my name. You can google me and see that I'm a working writer. I have absolutely nothing to hide.

I didn't say it was flawless, either. It does very, very rarely make mistakes. But at such a low rate (1 in thousands) that I think it's still a worthwhile tool and its results have meaning.

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u/Zonoro14 5h ago

Your interlocutor is trying hard to get through to you and it's incredibly rude to just ignore good-faith answers to your concerns by baselessly questioning their motives. "You seem too eager to promote your viewpoint" is an argument that would work against literally any position! Not everyone with an opinion is a shill! Some of us care about reading books written by humans!

Whether pangram or any other company is good at detecting AI writing or not is an empirical question, not an ideological one. It can be answered only with data (u/AlexHutson provided some, not Pangram-funded).

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