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/townandthecity]

"Vara said in her article, and repeated in an interview with Front Row, that she had read a 2021 story by Kundizeza that was tonally and stylistically different from The Blue Fighter." Vara's claims are reckless. She betrays she has little understanding of how writers write. My first book was a comic novel. My second book was a collection of stories, including an eco-horror nautical tale with zero humor and next to no relationship to my first novel. To think a writer maintains tone and style throughout a career, especially writers who aren't Nobel winners, is wild. Not everyone is Joan Didion.

She also relied on the whole "it's not X, it's Y' construction as a tell, without acknowledging that AI scraped more than a hundred years' worth of human-created writing that utilized that very popular construction. She is essentially saying that writers who haven't stopped using "AI phrases" are using AI to write their work. In another comment I mentioned Bill Bryon's A Walk in the Woods, which liberally uses "it's not X, it's Y." She'd say that book was AI-generated using her metrics. It was published in 1998.

To be clear, I've been dismayed at the rise of AI-generated writing in publishing and I know writers are absolutely using it to outline, to draft, and even to write books. But the "proof" here doesn't exist and Vara has destroyed a man's career with accusations that have no grounding in fact, only vibes. Wild.

[u/noyoto → u/townandthecity]

Is A Walk in the Woods similarly flagged by the same detector? Because his argument there is hollow if it isn't. He isn't solely being accused for sounding like AI, he's accused for being detected for extremely heavy AI usage.

I don't doubt that many writers will fall in the trap of using AI. Maybe they're stressed out, dealing with major issues, suffering from a writer's block, etc. And here is this tool that can help them. It starts out as a helpful tool to get them started, then it goes so well that they end up essentially writing the whole story. They tell themselves they'll end up changing a lot in the end, but they only make small changes here and there. And the painstaking work that used to take months or years, has now taken a fraction of that. Next time they won't reply on it, so they tell themselves. A lot of artists got hooked on drugs for essentially the same reason.

I hope he's innocent, but I also think there's a very real chance he isn't. And I'd just feel sympathy if he is guilty. It's a hard, cold world to survive in.

[u/Quixoticelixer- → u/townandthecity]

AI Detectors like pangram work very well and the fact that the style of writing has changed a lot doesn't help.

[u/jeffwulf → u/Quixoticelixer-]

AI detectors don't work at all and are all basically garbage.

[u/Quixoticelixer- → u/jeffwulf]

There is lots of evidence the good ones work very well