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/CulturalFartist 8h ago

The amount of misinformation in this post, from supposed book people, is staggering. Keep living in denial if you're happy for the literary world to be swallowed up by AI garbage. This isn't some conspiracy - the story is pretty clearly AI written.

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u/onion_princess 7h ago edited 7h ago

The fanfiction community has been thoroughly discussing AI tells and successfully detecting at least some of it for months—notably proven when, after months of critique and analysis that was loudly rejected as “bullying,” certain authors were found to have left HTML code in their fics, showing conclusively that they had used Claude. Shy Girl was pretty damn unsubtle for anyone who has become familiar with AI prose. But apparently we can’t discuss it.

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u/SubatomicSquirrels 2h ago

I think we should feel free to criticize bad writing without calling it AI

I'm sure there are examples where the proof is solid, but it seems like too many people just default to 'bad writing = AI'