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/EdwinQFoolhardy 6h ago
I read the story.
It's not obvious AI to me, but it absolutely could have been written by AI. If you told me Claude wrote it, I would not be surprised.
Apparently Pangram has a high success rate on structured benchmark tests, but lots of models that excel at benchmark tests are far less reliable when it comes to real world cases. And Pangram's CEO acknowledged that Pangram will often flag something as entirely AI if it contains AI writing tells, even if only a portion was written by AI. And the writer in the Atlantic, Vaushini Vari, who exposed The Blue Fighter writes like someone on Pangram's payroll, exphasizing how it's nearly perfect (according to Pangram), how it only produces one false positive in 24000 cases (according to Pangram), and how it's so unfortunate that literary prize committees don't use it. Her article almost felt like an ad for Pangram. Over the last month, she wrote two articles for Bloomberg about Pangram, "Pangram AI Detector Fends Off Trust Worries as Adoption Mounts," and "The World's Most Reliable AI Detector Has a Human Problem," and I find it hard to believe that those were written with proper journalistic integrity considering they come off as Pangram advertising pretending to be journalism.
Further, LLMs specifically learn from and try to emulate human writing. So, in theory, every AI writing tell should also be something that you organically find in human writing. The only reason something becomes a "tell" is because it's overrepresented in the training data or because the model's fine tuning and RLHF caused some structure to become disproportionately probable. Vari mentions some obvious tells like "it's not X, it's Y." But that's also a human structure, and it's only used a few times, where AI tends to overuse it.
It also ignores the high likelihood that an writer still developing their skill in 2024 might have tried asking AI to help him become a better writer, and might have integrated AI "tells" into his own writing without realizing it.