Zimbabwean author denies using AI to write award-winning story

Vara told BBC's Front Row programme that she had also used her own judgment "to suss out these things" and that every other previous Caine Prize winning story she had put through 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 response 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 issues that stood out about The Blue Fighter was that it had used sentence constructions using "X but Y", which she says is common in AI-generated texts."Not with anger, but with the quiet resignation of someone who had known all along this moment would come," is an example she gave from the story that described the character of the mother."The proliferation of those struck me," Vara told Front Row, adding that the story also had a lot of metaphors, also prevalent in writing generated by AI.The day after winning the Caine Prize, Kundizeza told the BBC he was 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 weaved that with fictionalised details from his own life around 2002 when Zimbabwe's economic troubles began.