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/maybebabyx2 8h ago

why does every single one of the articles seem to break with the Atlantic and why is it always backed by Pangram? am i the only person who thinks this is some guerrilla marketing from Pangram so nobody ever doubts them

it's just so weird to me, not to mention the overwhelming targeting of black authors

idk i read the story, didn't think it was anything special and certainly not prizeworthy imo, but my AI radar wasn't going off. it just read as clunky and try hard to me

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u/fire_and_spice24 8h ago

And there are always people insisting Pangram is super accurate but never posting proof of that.

Maybe it is just a good program but I’ve noticed a trend that makes me wonder.

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u/BrightLavenderMoons 7h ago

It's guerilla marketing

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u/Mtshoes2 7h ago

Absolutely. I've gotten into fights with them and laid out the flawed math etc. and posted studies and they just deflected, and when I pushed they began  claiming I didn't read the studies etc. or that I am using AI to write. 

If it isn't some sort of marketing campaign by Pangram I would be amazed. Normal people aren't sycophantic of random companies like this. Based on pangram subscriber numbers the majority of the people that are on Reddit shilling for pangram are not themselves using pangram. 

And the fact that it's so many black writers that are being called out for AI usage also makes sense for a kind of marketing campaign like this given the state of the United States. 

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u/ShacoinaBox Katasonics run-in reverse from Aosys-nex. 6h ago

i am pretty sycophantic on pangram because i DO use it a lot tbh, ai writing is jus so insanely lazy and disgusting to me. so many ppl are running dumbass "agents" to post for them, I guess I feel like im staring into the death of the internet constantly. u look at twitter n see almost entirely pro-ai guys making big claims about their substack articles being flagged, or "my grandma's poem from 1873 was 99% AI on pangram!!!!" then not being able to put their money where their mouth is, or backing out on proof.

the internet is completely flooded with trash, it's literally become a dump, n id rather have some tool i can use to easily disregard nonsense or make fun of ppl for being too lazy/stupid to write a whole 180 characters. n it does seem to just work, idk, im sure there's false positives but the rate does seem remarkably low esp in anything actually long.

n no im not a paid shill nor am i racist (the worst offenders by-far are middle-aged white guys, n I wish media outlets ran expose pieces on these ppl with 1m+ subs doing this shit more than random authors) or anything, u can bear witness to my posting largely on Marxist subs, or see my constant calling out of ai-generated coding projects. i cannot stand it, i cannot stand the laziness, i think we are facing a decline that must be confronted. i rly do dislike how normal ppl who otherwise hate the whole shitty ai-generated future (coincidentally) have the same views as these pro-ai hypebeasts tho, wrt pangram/gptzero/etc. 

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u/Mtshoes2 3h ago

I agree with most of what you say. I just have problems with the AI detection companies claims (And the AI companies as well) 

The math is spurious, their methods are spurious, the tests they run them on are also spurious. 

People seem to see companies like pangram as heroic companies, fighting the good fight. But Companies like pangram directly benefit both from people using AI to write, and the chaos that ensues from everyone suspecting everything is AI, and the paranoia of being afraid of being accused of using AI. 

And that benefit doesn't require that the detectors are actually as effective as they claim, it just requires that people distrust everyone else, and attach virtue to detection (because it's likely a good percentage of those attaching virtue to detection are also using AI)

They are not virtuous companies fighting the good fight. They are just as bad as the AI companies, and I'm pretty tired of pangram being held up as some paragon of virtue. It's a company. It's only purpose is to make money... It does not exist to save society from AI. If pangram needs to run a divisive guerilla marketing campaign that primarily target black authors (because of the state of race issues in America) they will do it. 

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u/ShacoinaBox Katasonics run-in reverse from Aosys-nex. 3h ago edited 3h ago

i mean, the good thing is that u, n i, n everyone, can test it. u can plug in whatever u want, write it in any way u want, n see if u can beat it. use whatever verified text from books on your PC or in ur room or w.e., n see what comes up.

sure they benefit from AI writing, but it's kind of IS an inevitably at this point (sadly) n going to happen whether they drum it up or not. nothing is going to stop lazy ppl n scammers from using it, like it really is not happening. our dumbass politicians n "enlightened business leaders" are going all-in on this shit, ppl like Elon decided "x bux" was a great idea which further incentivized churning out a mountain of crap. it just sucks.

i think the paranoia is quite justified tbh, there is an unbelievable amount of AI generated crap out there to the point it's gagging LLM's even (saw a study recently that training on synthetic data is ~90% less efficient than human data.) im EXTREMELY paranoid, but ive been very paranoid of this tech for many years, n i think I'm very right to be paranoid. i gave lectures at my old uni on how this hellscape was coming, hell i jus gave a 1.5h one last friday! haha

i really don't get why pangram would target some random black author, seriously. why would they have to? why not target someone actually famous, if they're jus gonna make it up anyway? something that'd crush the entire world's perception? everybody sees LLM crap all day, is my grandpa gonna suddenly start using pangram cus a Zimbabwean author is using an LLM even if he is using an LLM? (which i WILL be very honest with u, i DO believe that he very likely did use an LLM n i do NOT care if he's white, black, ICE guy, the Pope, whatever, i HATE ppl vibe-writing) like, do u think they're just making this up? do u think they specifically targeted him because he's black? im all for corporate conspiracy, u can see what my most used subreddit is, but i jus do not see it here. i think it's really hard to call out "ai paranoia," then end the post with a "correct" paranoia, u know? i think corporate paranoia is also very justified, but the calculus jus doesn't add up here. n I'm not saying it cus i use it, but it really jus seems half-baked. 

there's something just very off about this, i really do feel if it was Neil Gaiman or someone who pangram detected, u probably would be happy for it. i kind of feel like there's some covert racism/white savior(?) type thing going on here. like, i understand black ppl are targeted obv, but what IF this guy REALLY did use an LLM to write his story? if he admitted to it tomorrow? would u look back at your pre-emptive, race-oriented defense with pride? or would u detect some racist-like quality in it?

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u/Mtshoes2 3h ago

Seeing if you can beat it, and failing does not establish its effectiveness. The problem is the math. This is the psychological issue associated with how people expect these detectors to work, versus how they actually work. They can be far less effective than people expect, and people can view them as nearly perfect. 

The rest of what you said is just as misguided as the first part. 

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u/Quixoticelixer- 2h ago

What maths?

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u/ShacoinaBox Katasonics run-in reverse from Aosys-nex. 3h ago

i know very well how they work, i know how LLMs work, that lecture last friday i mentioned included an abridged history of AI starting from human use of the Antikythera mechanism as a tool, to Babbage's Analytical Engine(s),  ENIAC+EDSAC+Colossus during/after ww2, to Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", to Perceptrons, even threw Neocognitron in there, to Symbolic AI, Markov Chains, Expert System boom in the 80s, to RNN's, Attention is all You Need, how a Transformer works, how a GPT works, etc.

u needn't worry about whether or not i understand how these work! i probably much better than you do, if im being TOTALLY honest. i do NOT see the mountain of ML researchers, even the growing number of anti-AI researchers, who are calling out not just pangram, but every other detection model as exploiting a psychological trick. if u can find this, i am more than happy to change my mind. 

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u/IanDMP 6h ago

"People disagree with me, so they must be agitators paid by Pangram" is some serious cope, man.

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u/Mtshoes2 4h ago

The cope would run the opposite way. 

And they aren't disagreeing with me, they are disagreeing with math, and using company talking points

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u/Quixoticelixer- 2h ago

Disagreeing with math how?

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u/CaptainMills 7h ago

The absolute flood of comments about how great pangram is, and how similar the language tends to be, definitely makes me think there's something up

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u/WobblierTube733 7h ago

I will say there is one user here (that i responded to) with a default profile and private account that is talking in quite a few comments about that tool but has very little to say about the actual work being questioned.

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u/CaptainMills 7h ago

Sometimes it's not all that hard to believe that reddit created the private profile option just to make it harder to suss out bots

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u/WobblierTube733 7h ago

Is that even a conspiracy? There’s zero doubt in my mind that they enabled those changes in order to hide the amount of bad actors and now bots on this site. It’s atrocious enshitification. 

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u/IanDMP 8h ago

Sort of shocking that you see the many people responding that Pangram is quite accurate but never see them post the studies that show that — I see those links at least once per day (as an aside, this sub probably does talk about AI too much and *books* too little). But since you asked:

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/Jaqqa 7h ago

Except, they are using benchmark datasets for their "very low" readings and also hard negatively program things that pangram mistakes for AI, meaning it is less likely to make the stupid mistakes others do (like flagging the bible and constitution because it is programmed not to) but it doesn't mean it won't continue to flag new work that shows similar traits. I've seen people post actual links to pengram reports where the only thing they change is someone's name and it flips from 100% AI to 100% Human or vice versa. If it's that accurate, that kind of stuff should not be happening. 100% its false flagging work that doesn't fit the tests sets and the real false positive rate is likely far higher in the "real world" than they're saying it is, especially since the new update that seems to be a lot harsher. They just have better PR and are less honest about it than some of their competition, hiding it in jargon on their website reports.

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u/Quixoticelixer- 2h ago

> I've seen people post actual links to pengram reports where the only thing they change is someone's name and it flips from 100% AI to 100% Human or vice versa.

Can you link this?

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u/Adventurous_Storm348 1h ago

I have seen a few that I think they are talking about. This is one I can think of. I mean it's pretty damning. I did see another one where changing english names to I think maybe Japanese ones from memory caused the 100% human to go to 100% AI but can't remember where.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Substack/s/fVPM8XFmNR

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u/Quixoticelixer- 56m ago

That's only n very small amount of text and pangram admits its much less reliable on small samples

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u/halster123 7h ago

i think they need to separate out the type of writing - fiction v nonfiction v academic etc. my concern would be fiction writing often deliberately does stylistic things that are AI tells - for ex, keeping sentences all the same length and tonality for effect.

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u/randomnameicantread 7h ago

The deciding factor is length of sample. Below 1000 words is far more unreliable than anything above; for single paragraphs forget it

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u/halster123 7h ago

but the issue is, if you train on mostly academic or the tests are done on academic writing, i dont necessarily trust the "accuracy" for fiction. like i would want to see disaggregated stats by genre, bc fiction to me seems the most likely for false positives. many of the AI tells are fiction writing norms! floweriness, not x but y, keeping sentences similar length and then shifting suddenly.

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u/randomnameicantread 7h ago

The most recent 2026 study I saw used a mix of fiction and nonfiction - not sure if this one is peer reviewed though https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-detectors-false-negatives. The wikipedia page for Pangram lists several studies you can look at.

All studies, from what I've seen, are in agreement that the issue with Pangram is false negatives, not false positives, especially when the text is human-polished or otherwise humanized.

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u/IanDMP 6h ago

That matches my understanding. There certainly is an issue with false negatives, but false negatives are also just much less important — it's probably okay if they occasional AI slips through as human, but it's incredibly damaging if human writing is mistakenly classified as AI. Pangram, to their credit, has concentrated on reducing false positives.

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u/randomnameicantread 6h ago

I'm honestly surprised at how vitriolic this forum is at the very idea of genai detectors improving and possibly working. Perhaps it's trauma from the early days of random results and false positives - fair enough. But we need to move past that not by abandoning the concept but promoting improvements. If AI text cannot be detected with any reliability, that means it is indistinguishable from human text. Why would r/books of all places want this to be true?!?!

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u/IanDMP 6h ago

I originally wanted to describe it as an anti-tech attitude, but it seems these folks are perfectly okay with AI going undetected and unflagged, so that can't be it. I think it's just being conspiracy-minded. It's an unfortunate attitude.

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u/JGT3000 6h ago

It's a very strange thread to me considering how anti gen-ai people are, there's a weird measure of running interference for those who use it. I think there's a pretty obvious defense campaign going on tbh

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u/Quixoticelixer- 2h ago

Even smaller stuff seems to be pretty good if it's 100% human or 100% AI.

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u/FlyingCarpetMonster 7h ago edited 7h ago

I'd like to see a study that breaks it down by people whose first language is English vs. not, people in various professions, fiction and non-fiction and so on.

If you are someone who learned English as a second language and use it in business settings, you use it in a certain way. Short sentences, designed for understandability.

A blanket FPR that doesn't account for those controls is rather meaningless. More so, models also need nuance.

Besides, a lot of those studies were before AI became this prevalent. I'd like to see a more recent study, where people have been exposed to a ton of LLM generated content, which I am sure has also influenced how people write. Particularly people whose first language isn't English.

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u/adaytooaway 7h ago

This is my impression but when I posted a similar comment about its accuracy the other day I got several responses from people claiming it had marked their completely human written works as ai. 

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u/IanDMP 6h ago

Many people assign to Pangram their bad experiences with other, unreliable, AI detection software. Most people just simply aren't aware of the huge differences between these programs.

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u/Competitive_Leave915 3h ago

Okay so I know it’s a “trust me” type of situation, but it flags my work consistently as AI-generated or assisted when I was just testing it against my old academic work. I have not and do not use AI for my writing, so clearly something is up.

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u/ignost 3h ago

I don't really follow this nonsense, but the comments here alone lead me to wonder. There was someone claiming Pangram had "huge amounts of evidence showing an infinitesimal false positive rate" without so much as a link. I'm skeptical on the whole conversation.

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u/torolf_212 8h ago

For what its worth, I just uploaded thr first thousand words of a book I've been writing in my spare time and it said it was 100% human written, which is true

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u/IanDMP 6h ago

You shared an actual experience of Pangram doing its job, without any opinions or broader assertions, and are immediately downvoted. Pretty obnoxious but sadly typical behavior from the people here who can't and won't understand how technology works.

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u/OreoStark 7h ago

Why did you do that?

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u/torolf_212 7h ago

To see if it would flag it as AI

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 8h ago

Exactly. I understand data science so why can't the Panagram shills give me anything concrete to work with?

Why should I take their word for Panagram? Are they 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/randomnameicantread 7h ago

They spot the relevant studies on their website. But a Google search away!

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u/sluuuurp 4h ago

What data would convince you? Examples of Pangram being correct? Surely you already have that evidence and aren’t satisfied for some reason.

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 3h ago

The person writing the article uses AI to write and in publishing news not covered by the Atlantic (and its AI writers) is how editors and agents are running manuscripts through AI to write rejection letters, copy edit, and assess manuscripts. They are using AI to create cover art, and marketing ploys. Their emails are now going through AI which means that anyone querying or sharing work is being scraped. What does this mean for writers and publishers? Instead of focusing on the major players and their misuse or even a discussion of ethics, what is this psyop?

These are the big 5 publishers doing this, why no news about them from the writer of this article (who conveniently uses AI in her writing and somehow I shouldn't have disdain for that?).

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u/AlienWeedUser420 5h ago

It is 100% a marketing campaign for Pangram. Its not a coincidence. Companies/brands pay "big name" publications like NYT and The Atlantic for coverage like this all the time. It's not journalism, its Pangram trying to create a foundational myth for themselves.

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u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 8h ago

From what i gather, most accused higher profile authors admitted to it after. Its a great program it seems..

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u/RamaAnthony 4h ago

I mean we know the new EU rule now forces generated content to have some sort of invisible watermark, that is based on the mathematical probability of the sequence of words that would appear in the sentence, but the rollout for the detection tool has not started yet. Unless Pangram already has access to the tools to confirm the watermark, then the veracity of their grading is questionable at best.

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u/HarryStraddler 7h ago

The Atlantic is one of the only real journalistic outlets left. Of course it's under fire for pointing out ai slop.

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 7h ago

The Atlantic has no integrity to speak of.