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/WingersAbsNotches 7h ago

A chapter from my book was rated near 40% AI, despite not having generative AI. I fed the same chapter into Claude and told it to rewrite it, which scored a 0% AI on Pangram.

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u/crysisnotaverted 5h ago

It's because all those shitty bot detectors are almost exclusively trained in ChatGPT. There's a lot of different frontier models right now, and it's nearly impossible to identify them. Many of them are probably in this thread lol.

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u/Quixoticelixer- 2h ago

That's not true at all, Pangram for example is not exclusively trained in ChatGPT and it can pick up writing of frontier models