Zimbabwean author denies using AI to write award-winning story

Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using artificial intelligence (AI) to write his short story, which won this year's Caine Prize for African Writing.

His statement comes a week after he scooped the £10,000 ($13,000) award and a recent article in The Atlantic said AI-detection software Pangram had shown his work about a boy whose family falls on hard times was entirely AI generated.

"For the avoidance of doubt, I wrote The Blue Fighter," he posted on X.

The accusation has caused an uproar on social media and Caine Prize chair Ellah Wakatama told the BBC she was shocked that the US magazine had not waited for a full investigation before publishing.

"I do wish The Atlantic had spent more time investigating this so that alongside Pangram, they did have evidence of real human investigation of it before tainting the prize and tainting this winner," Wakatama told the BBC's Front Row programme.

The chair of the Caine Prize's board of trustees said she had been contacted on Friday about the allegation and Vauhini Vara's article - Yet Another Prizewinner Seems to Be AI - had been published on Sunday.

It follows rows over other literary prizes this year, in particular the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which was won by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir despite allegations that he had used AI, and the withdrawal of Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien from France's top literary award, the Goncourt, over allegations he used AI for his first novel, which he denies.

Vara, who quoted Wakatama in her article, said her wariness of Silicon Valley was "well founded and reasonable" but she said Pangram's internal research showed its assessments were rarely wrong.

The backlash to the article on social media has included comments from African writers with suggestions that such accusations are primarily being made against non-white writers.

Wale Lawal, the Nigerian founder of The Republic magazine, called out The Atlantic article for being "crazy, racist and wildly unethical".

Zimbabwean writer Joe Ruzvidzo, whose novel Welcome to Anywhere came out last year, said he stood by Kundizeza and that it was time "to fight this literary stop-and-frisk".

Nigerian publisher Modupe Daramola said it was necessary to discuss how "these AI allegations are targeting Black and African writers" and how they were often disproportionately scrutinised.

"There's something incredibly sinister about this," the Noisy Streetss Limited publisher posted on X.

"Pangram is itself AI-powered. Why should its assessment be treated as definitive?" she added.

Wakatama said as part of an internal investigation for the Caine Prize Kundizeza would be sending in documentation about his various drafts and there were ongoing conversations with all the judges and The Shallow Tales Review, the publication that first published The Blue Fighter in 2025.

In his statement, Kundizeza said had "a concrete, documented history" about the story's inspiration and he set out the chronology of its development.

Wakatama, who is also editor-at-large at Canongate Books, said Caine Prize submissions, which are all previously published, were not checked for AI, but writers vouched that their work was original.

She added that she was not against using AI per se to check entries, but what she was against was "it being used as a final arbiter in this case".

Wakatama said it was also important to remember Pangram was "not yet tested".

"I am not happy for the work of writers, and in this case especially black writers, to form the testing ground for something that is at best still rough and ready."

Research has found that AI detectors can wrongly flag human writing as AI generated. Vara conceded that any AI-detection product, "including one as good of Pangram" was "not going to be 100% accurate".

In her article, as well as citing Pangram research she also quoted a recent paper by researchers at Free University of Brussels, which said it had found zero cases of Pangram, and two other AI-detection tools, getting it wrong when it came to English-language writing by non-native English speakers.

The study notes that tools like Pangram should be considered "as an initial flag for further investigation".

Vara told BBC's Front Row programme that she had also used her own judgment "to suss out these things" and that every other previous Caine Prize winning story she had put through Pangram "came out as 100% human".

"I also found an earlier 2021 story by the same author. I ran that through Pangram. It also came out as 100% human. And what struck me was that was a really good, interesting story. And tonally, it's so different from this story, as if the same person hadn't written both."

In response Kundizeza wrote: "To suggest that a writer cannot write in different styles or genres, or improve his writing substantially after five or more years fundamentally misunderstands the craft of writing."

For Vara, one of the stylistic issues that stood out about The Blue Fighter was that it had used sentence constructions using "X but Y", which she says is common in AI-generated texts.

"Not with anger, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had known all along this moment would come," is an example she gave from the story that described the character of the mother.

"The proliferation of those struck me," Vara told Front Row, adding that the story also had a lot of metaphors, also prevalent in writing generated by AI.

The day after winning the Caine Prize, Kundizeza told the BBC he was inspired after hearing a poem read by South African Vangile Gantsho at an event in Ghana last year about her father's obsession with building fish tanks.

He said he had weaved that with fictionalised details from his own life around 2002 when Zimbabwe's economic troubles began.

"Much like the father in the story, my own dad... was an accountant, but he quit his job to grow tomatoes. So it kind of touches on both of our fathers," he told BBC Newsday.

On X, Kundizeza said he was heartened by "the numerous messages of solidarity from fellow writers and readers", ending his message by saying: "Most importantly, I will continue to write."

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