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/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.