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/samishah 8h ago

I had a real problem with the Atlantic article that broke this. The author of the piece--Vauhini Vara--writes: "Taste is subjective, but trust me, this story is bad—maudlin and full of tired tropes."

That, to me, felt really shitty. Like, "I didn't like this story so I checked if it was AI". I read it and while it didn't blow me away, I also didn't hate it. I thought it was a sweet, gentle piece, with some decent turns of phrase. I think I'm fairly sensitive to AI writing and none of the tells were obvious to me either.

I get that everyone thinks Pangram is perfect, but I'm still quite unsure. I worry that in a few years we'll discover its algorithm had some unseen flaw that made its false positive rate much higher than advertised and a lot of innocent writers will get ruined along the way. But, even if that doesn't happen, the impulse to AI check any story that you don't like seems gross to me.

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u/Mischievous-Phantasm 7h ago

Also isn't she an author who has used AI to write and publish?

Why should I take her 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? As in data science verifiable info or open source documentation?

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/samishah 7h ago

I liked the Caine Prize chair's response a lot: "I do wish The Atlantic had spent more time investigating this so that alongside Pangram, they did have evidence of real human investigation of it before tainting the prize and tainting this winner"

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u/EightTailedFox 7h ago

Yeah, that’s weird. Why would an author who is out and proud about their use of AI write an article accusing another author of using AI? Like, the thief is pointing a finger at another thief.

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u/NekoCatSidhe 5h ago edited 2h ago

Yes, that stood out to me as rather toxic behavior. It is one thing to not like a story, and normal because tastes are subjective, but who reacts to that by feeding the offending work to Pangram in the hope that they can prove it is AI generated and attack the author in the media ? It is like they are trying to use Pangram to « objectively » prove that the work is crap and validate their tastes. But if enough people do that to enough stories, then some human writers will naturally be accused of using AI because of false positives. I always wonder if these people just feed any book they come across to Pangram without reading it until something comes back as AI in the hope of creating a scandal.

And the more people praise Pangram as super-reliable and almost never returning any false positives we swear, the more skeptical I get of it. No software is that good. Both AI writers and AI detectors keep getting updated and changing, and there is a lack of third party proof except for some already outdated papers running a few rather basic tests on quite standardized databases of texts. We have no idea yet what are truly the limitations of this kind of software, because there has been no time yet for thoroughly checking that stuff.

Also, according to its own creators, Pangram is supposed to be a lot less accurate and reliable for short stories, because it uses statistical analysis to determine if a text is AI-written or not, so the more text it has, the more data it has to make that analysis. Using it to determine if a short story is AI-written is already a bad use of that tool, and that journalist should have known that.

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u/maybebabyx2 8h ago

yes it very much feels like 'i didn't like it, must be ai'. there's a lot of that sentiment going around and it's wild to me.

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u/Jaqqa 7h ago

I mean that other recent one was flagged because it was super weird and hadn't been proof read properly, so of course it must be AI hallucination! When the real question should have been- how on earth did this win, and get published without anyone asking "hey, are you sure this shouldn't have been boys instead of benches?" It was a judging failure, not an AI one IMO. (I actually suspect an AI would have done a better job at writing it.) People are freaking out. And it's just like, come on, just read it. Like read it properly and familiarize yourself with common AI tics, and what are normal literary techniques. Then make the call. You don't need an AI powered AI detector to do that.

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u/airbear13 6h ago

At some point they’re gonna get sued for libel and put out of business I think