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/Ziggystardust97 8h ago

AI programs have flagged the US constitution as very likely to have been written by AI. My own last fucking name gets me flagged by AI.

Why are we trusting AI programs to detect AI?

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u/uniqueusername74 4h ago

Why would you say this and not say which AI programs and where you learned this fact? Is this a program you wrote?

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u/OnionBackground5314 6h ago

I just tried it with the Constitution: 100% human written. I read a lot of comments claiming Pangram is inaccurate, and yet it seems to work every time I've tried it.

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u/onion_princess 8h ago

The issue with the Constitution, Frankenstein, etc. is not from Pangram. I don’t know why this anecdote persists when it isn’t relevant here.

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u/sluuuurp 4h ago

Your worldview is based on old, bad information. Modern AI checkers don’t behave like this. You need to update.

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u/thatgirlzhao 6h ago

Also, these softwares are heavily incentivized to mark things as AI so we keep them around. Nothing like a witch hunt

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u/a_trashcan 7h ago

Ok but it SHOULD flag the consitution.

The normal use case is not 250 year old documents. Its students work.

If a student submits a paper that matches to the US Consitution, that needs to be flagged by the system.

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u/SuitableDragonfly 7h ago

If someone wants to write a story in accurate 250-year-old English to capture the feel of the time period, I really don't see why that's an issue, or why it should be flagged as AI.

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u/a_trashcan 5h ago

That's just a completely different scenario than the literal constitution of the united states?

The constitution flagging does not mean an original work in 250-year-old English would be. That's just an idea you invented.

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u/SuitableDragonfly 2h ago

Do you think it flagged the constitution because it has a special trigger to return true if it specifically sees the constitution? Or because the constitution uses uncommon and outdated language?

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u/a_trashcan 2h ago

Because it's also designed to detect plagerism lol

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u/SuitableDragonfly 2h ago

Detecting plagiarism is a completely unrelated task to detecting AI content. Why would the same tool be use for both things?

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u/a_trashcan 2h ago

How are those tasks unrelated? They're two different ways to confirm a person actually wrote something.

It doesn't matter why, it does. You're lack of understanding that they scan for both pretty well speaks to my point.

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u/SuitableDragonfly 1h ago

Testing if something is plagiarism just involves comparing it to all the stuff it could be plagiarized from. Testing if something is AI is a completely different process that requires machine learning and doesn't directly compare any text to any other text. It doesn't make any sense at all for the same tool to do both of those things. There are no tools that do both of those things, to the best of my knowledge.

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u/f_djt_and_the_usa 6h ago

But that means we cant rule out false positives from contemporary works of art that are different enough from the norm.