Zimbabwean writer denies AI use in Caine Prize story as organizers review claims

Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write his award-winning short story "The Blue Fighter," following a report by The Atlantic that the AI detection tool Pangram flagged nearly the entire story as machine-generated, except for an excerpt from a poem by another author.

Kundizeza's story won the $10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing last week. He posted a denial on X late Tuesday and told The Associated Press on Wednesday that African writers and readers should challenge such accusations. "There is need to use technology responsibly so that it is not deployed to create a bias against natives who seek to write about their own experiences and cultures," he said, adding that AI is known to be biased against them in certain ways.

The author insisted the story, centered on family relationships and economic hardship, was entirely his own work and had gone through standard editorial processes. He said it reflected his family's life during Zimbabwe's years of economic turmoil, with characters and setting drawn from events in his own life. Responding to doubts about stylistic differences from his earlier work, he said writers do not produce work from a single fixed template, and that suggesting a writer cannot write in different styles or improve substantially after five or more years misunderstands the craft of writing.

The Caine Prize organizers have not retracted the award but said it is under review and that they aim to take a human-centered approach to examine such claims. The controversy has fueled a wider debate on social media, with some questioning whether Black authors are being unfairly targeted by AI-related accusations. Radical Books Collective called it part of a broader pattern, citing other writers of color previously entangled in AI plagiarism disputes.