Zimbabwean author denies using AI to write award-winning story

Zimbabwean writer denies using AI to create prize-winning story

Simbarashe Kundizeza says a poem about fish tanks inspired him to write a story about his family’s hardships in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwean author Simbarashe Kundizeza has rejected claims that he used artificial intelligence (AI) to produce his short story, which won this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing.

His denial came a week after he received the £10,000 ($13,000) prize and after a recent Atlantic article said AI-detection software Pangram had indicated that his story about a boy whose family runs into financial trouble was entirely generated by AI.

“For the avoidance of doubt, I wrote The Blue Fighter,” he posted on X

The allegation has sparked a backlash on social media, and Caine Prize chair Ellah Wakatama told the BBC she was stunned that the US magazine had not waited for a full inquiry 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 claim and Vauhini Vara’s article -

Yet Another Prizewinner Seems to Be AI

It comes amid disputes over other literary prizes this year, especially the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which was won by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir despite accusations that he had used AI, and the withdrawal of Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien from France’s leading literary award, the Goncourt, over claims he used AI for his first novel, which he denies

Vara, who quoted Wakatama in her article, said her caution about Silicon Valley was “well founded and reasonable” but added that Pangram’s internal research showed its judgments were rarely wrong.

The reaction to the article on social media has included remarks from African writers suggesting that such accusations are mainly directed at non-white writers.

Wale Lawal, the Nigerian founder of The Republic magazine, described The Atlantic article as “crazy, racist and wildly unethical”

Zimbabwean writer Joe Ruzvidzo, whose novel Welcome to Anywhere was published last year, said he supported Kundizeza and that it was time “to fight this literary stop-and-frisk”

Nigerian publisher Modupe Daramola said it was important to discuss how “these AI allegations are targeting Black and African writers” and how they were often subjected to disproportionate scrutiny.

“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 that as part of an internal Caine Prize investigation, Kundizeza would submit documentation of his various drafts, and that discussions were continuing with all the judges and The Shallow Tales Review, the publication that first published

The Blue Fighter in 2025

In his statement, Kundizeza said he had “a concrete, documented history” of the story’s inspiration and laid out the timeline of its development.

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

She added that she was not opposed to using AI in principle to check entries, but she was “against is it being used as a final arbiter in this case”.

Wakatama said it was also important to remember that 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 shown that AI detectors can wrongly label human writing as AI-generated. Vara acknowledged that any AI-detection product, “including one as good of Pangram” was “not going to be 100% accurate”.

In her article, alongside 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 says tools like Pangram should be treated “as an initial flag for further investigation”.

Vara told BBC’s Front Row programme that she had also relied on her own judgment “to suss out these things” and that every other previous Caine Prize-winning story she had tested with 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 reply, 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 features that stood out in The Blue Fighter was its use of sentence structures built around “X but Y”, which she said is common in AI-generated text.

“Not with anger, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had known all along this moment would come,” was one example she gave from the story, describing the mother’s character.

“The proliferation of those struck me,” Vara told Front Row, adding that the story also contained many metaphors, which are also common in AI-generated writing.

The day after winning the Caine Prize, Kundizeza told the BBC he had been 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 combined that with fictionalised details from his own life around 2002, when Zimbabwe’s economic problems 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 encouraged by “the numerous messages of solidarity from fellow writers and readers”, ending his message with: “Most importantly, I will continue to write.”