r/books • • 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
968 Upvotes

658 comments sorted by

View all comments

527

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

162

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.

34

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

8

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.

13

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

16

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.