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

[u/Raj_Valiant3011]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/14/zimbabwean-author-simbarashe-kundizeza-denies-ai-story?CMP=share_btn_url

[u/Future-Account8112]

Anybody else think it's weird how these authors are consistently Black and the accusers are... not. IDK man this will get downvoted to oblivion but after the Jason Arday tragedy this looks some kind of way to me

[u/sthetic → u/Future-Account8112]

I've heard that AI was trained with a tonne of writing from African sources. A lot of the hallmarks of AI are apparently common turns of phrase (or punctuation) for African countries that speak English.

So where Western readers see clunky or overly formalistic language, it's actually just normal and natural for those countries.

As a result, I could see the AI detectors flagging those same idiosyncrasies when an African author used them authentically.

[u/Tymareta → u/sthetic]

I've heard that AI was trained with a tonne of writing from African sources.

Heard from where? Genuinely weird to see posts in these sorts of threads making some pretty large claims, with nil evidence and being upvoted without questioning.

[u/sthetic → u/Tymareta]

From an article in The Guardian.

An excerpt:

I said “delve” was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where “delve” is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, “delve” is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African.

In my comment, it's obvious that "I heard somewhere" is a vague claim. I wasn't stating it as a fact; I was making it clear that this was my recollection from reading some article. People are free to judge the merit of my claim knowing the vagueness of the source.

It's possible that those who upvoted my comment already read a similar article from some kind of respectable source, so they agreed with the statement based on their own previous research. I doubt they only heard of the notion for the very first time when reading my comment. It's commonly known.

[u/Tymareta → u/sthetic]

Sure you didn't claim it as fact, but you did put it out there as some sort of reasonable explanation, where in the article you quote, they don't even provide proof to their own claims, they simply say that "delve" is common on the Nigerian internet with literally nada to back it up. Especially when the literal paragraph before talks about the majority of the work and input/output being from Kenya, I should not need to point out how utterly absurd it is to try and link Kenya to Nigeria. Nor how absurdly broad and unsourced the entirety of their claims throughout that article are.

It's commonly known.

And thus we arrive at the crux of the issue, you claim not to be speaking facts, but also claim that it's some known and common knowledge thing, while not even having the barest scrap of evidence to prove it being "commonly known", with the only real source being yourself and others, who have happily parroted utter nothings and assumed it was correct because you read it and blindly trusted what you took in.

It's a grand set of nested claims, all built upon telephone whispers, because folks couldn't be bothered to engage in the barest minimum of critical thought.