Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied the AI allegations surrounding The Blue Fighter, his Caine prize-winning short story, after The Atlantic reported that detection software judged the story almost entirely AI-generated. The Caine prize says it is reviewing the allegations.

How the allegations surfaced

The Blue Fighter was announced as the winner of the Caine prize for African writers on 6 October. Five days later, on 11 October, The Atlantic published a piece by the author and journalist Vauhini Vara titled "Yet Another Literary prize winner Seems to Be AI".

For the article, Vara ran the story through the AI-detection software Pangram, which itself uses AI, and it deemed the story almost completely artificially generated. Pangram found the story's one human element to be its epigraph: an unpublished poem by the South African writer Vangile Gantsho.

• •Vara said she was struck by the proliferation of language common in AI-produced writing, including "not x, but y" constructions, many metaphors and platitudinous aphorisms.
• •She also offered a blunt literary verdict: "Taste is subjective, but trust me, this story is bad – maudlin and full of tired tropes."

The writer's response

In a statement on X, Kundizeza rejected the claims, saying the story is entirely his own work. "For the avoidance of doubt, I wrote 'The Blue Fighter'. I did not use generative AI to write it," he said.

Vara had noted, in her article and in a Front Row interview, that she had read a 2021 story by Kundizeza that was tonally and stylistically different from The Blue Fighter. Kundizeza responded that suggesting a writer cannot work in different styles, or improve substantially after five or more years, fundamentally misunderstands the craft of writing. In his statement, he said he looked forward to continuing to work with the Caine prize team and would continue to write.

The Caine prize and detection reliability

The prize said it was its responsibility to look into the allegations, and that it takes a human-centred approach, supporting writers during the process.

Caine prize chair Ellah Wakatama told BBC's Front Row that she was not against AI, but against it serving as a final arbiter. "They have already proclaimed our winner to be a cheater without investigating it properly," she said of The Atlantic. She added that she was not happy for writers' work, especially black writers', to form the testing ground for something that is "at best still rough and ready".

Vara defended the detection findings by citing Pangram research finding false positives rare, including among non-native English speakers, and a peer-reviewed article that found Pangram had "strong accuracy" when assessing mock academic papers. She nonetheless acknowledged to the BBC that there was "relatively little third-party research" on the accuracy of AI-detection software.

A wider pattern

The dispute follows earlier AI-related rows at other literary prizes. In July, The Serpent in the Grove took the Commonwealth Foundation's short story prize for the Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir, even though claims circulated on social media that the story bore "obvious markers" of AI writing. Last month, an anonymous online account alleged that C'était Ça Ou Mourir, a novel by the Canadian-Haitian writer Thélyson Orélien, was "almost entirely" AI-written, and the novel was removed from the Goncourt longlist.

The Caine prize says it is reviewing the allegations.