Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has rejected allegations that he used artificial intelligence to compose his short story “The Blue Fighter,” which won this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing and its accompanying £10,000 prize. The denial came approximately a week after an article in The Atlantic referenced AI-detection software Pangram, which assessed the story as entirely AI-generated. Kundizeza posted a statement on X asserting he authored the work himself.
Caine Prize chair Ellah Wakatama expressed frustration with The Atlantic’s publication process, stating the magazine should have conducted more thorough investigation before publishing the allegation. She noted that the article, written by Vauhini Vara, appeared on Sunday following a Friday notification about the allegations. The controversy has emerged amid a broader pattern of AI-authorship disputes affecting literary competitions, including disputes involving the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and France’s Goncourt Prize.
Vara defended her reporting by citing Pangram’s internal research and stating the software’s assessments are rarely inaccurate. She also referenced a study by Free University of Brussels researchers examining AI-detection accuracy. Vara noted stylistic elements in the story, including repeated “X but Y” sentence constructions and extensive use of metaphors, which she characterized as common in AI-generated text. Additionally, Vara observed that previous Caine Prize winners tested through Pangram registered as human-written, and a 2021 story by Kundizeza also tested as human-generated, though she found it tonally distinct from the prize-winning work.
The allegations have provoked significant backlash from African writers and industry figures, who argue the accusations disproportionately target non-white writers. Critics questioned why an AI-powered tool should serve as definitive evidence and noted that research demonstrates AI detectors can incorrectly flag human writing as machine-generated. Kundizeza stated he possessed documented evidence of the story’s development and explained its inspiration derived from hearing a poem at an event in Ghana, which he combined with personal experiences from Zimbabwe’s economic period around 2002.
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