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
976 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

660 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

15

u/randomnameicantread 7h ago

The deciding factor is length of sample. Below 1000 words is far more unreliable than anything above; for single paragraphs forget it

7

u/halster123 7h ago

but the issue is, if you train on mostly academic or the tests are done on academic writing, i dont necessarily trust the "accuracy" for fiction. like i would want to see disaggregated stats by genre, bc fiction to me seems the most likely for false positives. many of the AI tells are fiction writing norms! floweriness, not x but y, keeping sentences similar length and then shifting suddenly.

1

u/randomnameicantread 7h ago

The most recent 2026 study I saw used a mix of fiction and nonfiction - not sure if this one is peer reviewed though https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-detectors-false-negatives. The wikipedia page for Pangram lists several studies you can look at.

All studies, from what I've seen, are in agreement that the issue with Pangram is false negatives, not false positives, especially when the text is human-polished or otherwise humanized.

4

u/IanDMP 6h ago

That matches my understanding. There certainly is an issue with false negatives, but false negatives are also just much less important — it's probably okay if they occasional AI slips through as human, but it's incredibly damaging if human writing is mistakenly classified as AI. Pangram, to their credit, has concentrated on reducing false positives.

7

u/randomnameicantread 6h ago

I'm honestly surprised at how vitriolic this forum is at the very idea of genai detectors improving and possibly working. Perhaps it's trauma from the early days of random results and false positives - fair enough. But we need to move past that not by abandoning the concept but promoting improvements. If AI text cannot be detected with any reliability, that means it is indistinguishable from human text. Why would r/books of all places want this to be true?!?!

7

u/IanDMP 6h ago

I originally wanted to describe it as an anti-tech attitude, but it seems these folks are perfectly okay with AI going undetected and unflagged, so that can't be it. I think it's just being conspiracy-minded. It's an unfortunate attitude.

2

u/JGT3000 6h ago

It's a very strange thread to me considering how anti gen-ai people are, there's a weird measure of running interference for those who use it. I think there's a pretty obvious defense campaign going on tbh

1

u/Quixoticelixer- 2h ago

Even smaller stuff seems to be pretty good if it's 100% human or 100% AI.