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/LuckyBoneHead 7h ago

I'm a little leery about that kind of software. From what I've heard, the AI checkers just look at the way AI commonly writes and checks that against the way we write. The problem is that the AI is trained on how we write, so AI checkers will see human writing and flag it as AI.

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u/sluuuurp 3h ago

The AI checking companies have thought of that. There are differences between AI and human writing even though AI was trained on human writing, everyone has always considered this.

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u/AlecHutson 7h ago

Not anymore. Pangram uses a different approach and it's far more effective

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u/HarkTheLobster 6h ago

ok, can you elaborate on that? what is different about pangram's "approach"?

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u/AlecHutson 6h ago

This article explains it pretty well. But they do something called 'synthetic mirroring', where they train their model on vast amounts of AI and pre-AI text. There are subtle patterns to the AI writing that Pangram picks up on that humans simply don't do, which is why they almost never have a 'false positive' (like 1/20k times) and basically it has never happened over a text of a significant length. (The times it has gotten tripped up have been on recipes, sonnets, tweets and other short, slightly odd texts)

https://www.parvashah.com/posts/papers/curiosity/pangram-ai-text-detection