Pangram wants to save literature from AI slop. Literature has its doubts

On October 6, the Zimbabwean author Simbarashe Kundizeza won the Caine Prize for African Writing, for the short story “The Blue Fighter.” Less than a week later, The Atlantic published a piece declaring that the story’s narrator “has all the personality of a chatbot.” “The AI detector Pangram flags almost the entire story as AI-generated,” the article reported. Kundizeza denied that he had used any such technology. “For the avoidance of doubt, I wrote ‘The Blue Fighter.’ I did not use generative AI to write it. It is entirely my own work,” he wrote in a statement on X. The Caine Prize, which comes with a £10,000 award, had become the newest front in a war engulfing the literary world, powered by AI writing tools and AI writing detectors. Scandals about suspected AI use have spread up and down the writing industry this year.