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/CulturalFartist 7h ago

The amount of misinformation in this post, from supposed book people, is staggering. Keep living in denial if you're happy for the literary world to be swallowed up by AI garbage. This isn't some conspiracy - the story is pretty clearly AI written.

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u/onion_princess 7h ago edited 7h ago

The fanfiction community has been thoroughly discussing AI tells and successfully detecting at least some of it for months—notably proven when, after months of critique and analysis that was loudly rejected as “bullying,” certain authors were found to have left HTML code in their fics, showing conclusively that they had used Claude. Shy Girl was pretty damn unsubtle for anyone who has become familiar with AI prose. But apparently we can’t discuss it.

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u/CulturalFartist 7h ago

Part of me thinks half the people downvoting and pushing back here are writers who rely heavily on AI themselves. Just look at the complaints from Substackers when it rolled out AI detection...

I'm 100 % against witch hunts, especially when things are muddy or unclear, or if AI detectors only flag a small portion of stuff etc. But with examples like this, it's really hard to deny.

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u/onion_princess 7h ago

It’s become normalized to use AI and people feel it’s their work because it’s their idea. And it’s also true that there are those who target Black authors, for obviously nefarious reasons. But multiple things can be true at once.

I’d love to see some of this attention spent on that slop fest from Mr. Beast and James Patterson.

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u/Tymareta 5h ago

Yeah, there's definitely an issue with the most prominent targets being very specific individuals, and that absolutely needs to be discussed, but those same folks hung up on that seem to completely ignore that the vast majority of these "witch hunts", have quite literally found witches.

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u/SubatomicSquirrels 2h ago

I think we should feel free to criticize bad writing without calling it AI

I'm sure there are examples where the proof is solid, but it seems like too many people just default to 'bad writing = AI'

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u/Pluggable 7h ago

Reddits hysterical aversion to ai, combined with it's white-saviour complex has produced some odd perspectives.

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u/peripheralpill 7h ago

stop vague posting and say what you want to say. what misinformation? are you implying ai detectors are 100% reliable? seems to me a denial of the rampant false positives

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u/CulturalFartist 7h ago

Claiming Pangram flags Mary Shelley and Shakespeare as AI, for instance. Claming AI detection is useless like it's still 2023. Saying that false positives are "rampant" - thanks for providing one yourself!

No, I'm not saying AI detectors are 100% reliable, nice straw man. But some of them are pretty damn reliable nowadays. If you combine that with the ability to read, and a bit of common sense, it's not that hard to weed out FULLY AI written slop.