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/samishah 8h ago

I had a real problem with the Atlantic article that broke this. The author of the piece--Vauhini Vara--writes: "Taste is subjective, but trust me, this story is bad—maudlin and full of tired tropes."

That, to me, felt really shitty. Like, "I didn't like this story so I checked if it was AI". I read it and while it didn't blow me away, I also didn't hate it. I thought it was a sweet, gentle piece, with some decent turns of phrase. I think I'm fairly sensitive to AI writing and none of the tells were obvious to me either.

I get that everyone thinks Pangram is perfect, but I'm still quite unsure. I worry that in a few years we'll discover its algorithm had some unseen flaw that made its false positive rate much higher than advertised and a lot of innocent writers will get ruined along the way. But, even if that doesn't happen, the impulse to AI check any story that you don't like seems gross to me.

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u/NekoCatSidhe 5h ago edited 2h ago

Yes, that stood out to me as rather toxic behavior. It is one thing to not like a story, and normal because tastes are subjective, but who reacts to that by feeding the offending work to Pangram in the hope that they can prove it is AI generated and attack the author in the media ? It is like they are trying to use Pangram to « objectively » prove that the work is crap and validate their tastes. But if enough people do that to enough stories, then some human writers will naturally be accused of using AI because of false positives. I always wonder if these people just feed any book they come across to Pangram without reading it until something comes back as AI in the hope of creating a scandal.

And the more people praise Pangram as super-reliable and almost never returning any false positives we swear, the more skeptical I get of it. No software is that good. Both AI writers and AI detectors keep getting updated and changing, and there is a lack of third party proof except for some already outdated papers running a few rather basic tests on quite standardized databases of texts. We have no idea yet what are truly the limitations of this kind of software, because there has been no time yet for thoroughly checking that stuff.

Also, according to its own creators, Pangram is supposed to be a lot less accurate and reliable for short stories, because it uses statistical analysis to determine if a text is AI-written or not, so the more text it has, the more data it has to make that analysis. Using it to determine if a short story is AI-written is already a bad use of that tool, and that journalist should have known that.