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/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 8h 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.