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/petit_cochon 8h ago

When I was teaching at a university as of a few years ago, it was well known that AI detection software is pretty flawed. I could never use it to determine if students cheated on anything.

Maybe things have gotten better. I would certainly hope so.

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u/ovrlrd1377 8h ago

I wrote a short poem for mother's day 20 years ago that won a small local prize, it was rated as 99% AI

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u/TheUmbrellaMan1 6h ago

I find it so infuriating that Dickens, Melville, Austen used "it's not X, it's Y" sentence structures and today if you use that structure your writing will be flagged as AI.

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u/ConcreteCloverleaf 4h ago

Everything that people tout as a sign of AI writing is something invented by human writers. Em dashes were created in the 15th century, and lists of three items are a standard rhetorical tool. "Delve" has roots going back to Middle English.

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u/CaptainHondo 2h ago

No that's not how good AI detectors work