The anti-AI writing police are everywhere. What are they looking for?

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. In March, the publisher Hachette canceled the US release of author Mia Ballard’s self-published 2025 novel “Shy Girl” after a New York Times report found that it may have been written using AI.

In May, a Trinidadian author named Jamir Nazir was accused of using AI to write “The Serpent in the Grove,” which won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

In July, researchers at Stony Brook University posited that H.M. Wolfe’s “Daggermouth,” a national bestseller, was 60% AI-written according to a data set shared with The Atlantic.

More accusations kept flying: debut author Jerry Falade lost a $2 million book deal in July after his agents pulled his debut novel over suspicions he had used AI writing tools. In September, a claim that a book by Haitian Canadian author Thélyson Orélien had failed an AI detection test led the jury for the prestigious Goncourt prize to remove him from its longlist.

As generative AI proliferates, it’s easier than ever for an author, or someone who wants to be seen as an author, to come up with a story- or book-shaped piece of text. It’s harder than ever for a reader or a prize judge or a publisher to be sure that the words on a page were produced by human thought and effort, rather than a machine prompt.

The result is a literary version of the ruined world in the movie “Blade Runner.” Anxiety and suspicion about robot infiltrators are everywhere — and so are people claiming to hunt the robots down.

Multiple companies now offer products that promise to spot the difference, with often contradictory, biased or erratic results. The makers of Pangram, an AI detection platform that has been cited as authoritative in many of the recent controversies, claim it can distinguish between human and synthetic writing with near-perfect accuracy.

“We’re trying to mitigate some of the harms that come from these powerful AI models,” said Max Spero, the CEO and founder of Pangram.

Spero is quick to admit that he doesn’t have a background in literature or creative writing. He is a machine learning engineer by trade, and worked as a software engineer at Google and an autonomous vehicle startup called Nuro before founding Pangram in 2023.

“I’m an avid reader. I’ve never been a writer. I haven’t lived in that world,” Spero said.

Nevertheless, Spero presents Pangram as a protector of the magazines and journals that make up the literary ecosystem.

“A lot of these outlets are getting flooded with submissions because they pay writers they publish and don’t charge anything to send in your work,” Spero said. “There are these perverse incentives that come from AI making it nearly free. Our goal is to help reduce the friction on the defensive side to help people understand what’s AI and what’s not.”

What does a robot sound like?

Pangram caught widespread public attention in May, after the Commonwealth Foundation announced that Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” was among the winners of its competition.

The story was ornately written, with figurative language that struck some readers as extravagant or peculiar: “Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission. His eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him: old promises that never ripened, the ache where hope should live, a gnawing sense that land can own a man while making him swear the land belongs to him.”

But many people declared they saw telltale tics of chatbot writing. A folklore has quickly grown up around generative AI prose, describing various shibboleths that are supposed to betray the robot voice.

One early AI panic revolved around the alleged overuse of em-dashes — an especially funny notion to the many magazine journalists who’d been using them for in-sentence digressions for years — while other people swear the giveaways are “It’s not X, but Y,” grandiose descriptions like “load-bearing,” or lists of three things.

The reason such devices show up in AI writing, though, is that they were already in common usage among the legions of human writers whose work AI companies ingested to train their systems.

“AI slop is sort of indistinguishable from human-written slop because the AI is trained on bad writing,” said the author Patrick Nathan. “The reason AI writes badly is because the vast majority of writing is bad.”

To back up their confidence that something was wrong with the style of the story, then, the people accusing Nazir of using AI also appealed to Pangram numbers.

“Pangram flags at 100% but also, come on, if you know you know,” Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote on Bluesky. Others posted screenshots of the story’s Pangram results like trophies.

It’s not lost on the writing community that some of the most gleeful AI hunters, like the tools they use, come from the tech sector, not from among their own ranks. Readers trying to understand what was going on with “The Serpent in the Grove” could encounter Nabeel S. Qureshi, a former engineer at Palantir, posting on X about “the ‘hums’ trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing.”

Suspicious patterns of suspicion

There’s also the glaring question of whose work gets fed into Pangram for investigation, and why. The originally anonymous accusation against Orélien was made by Samuel Fitoussi, a conservative French newspaper columnist at Le Figaro and the author of the book “Woke Fiction.” Many of the major scandals were also centered on nonwhite writers; Nazir is of South Asian descent, while Ballard, Wolfe, Falade, Kundizeza and Orélien are Black.

“Part of this has to do with a broader anti-woke and anti-Black tenor in a lot of conservative and right-leaning online discourse,” said Doyle D. Calhoun, a professor of postcolonial studies at the University of Cambridge.

Calhoun said that for decades the literary establishment was made up mostly of white men. Now that those demographics are changing and there are more non-white authors getting book deals and winning awards, there’s an emerging resentment, especially on social media.

“Once these accusations — many of them sort of unverified or unfounded — are out there, the internet media ecosystem just goes into sort of overdrive,” he said. Historically, these sorts of claims also tend not to “stick” to white writers in the same way they do with non-white writers, Calhoun said.

Spero said that Pangram is calibrated to call something AI-assisted only if the tool is extremely confident in its analysis.

The company’s own estimates claim that false positives — in which the tool wrongly reports that a piece of human writing was created — are 1 in 10,000 and shrinking. Peer-reviewed studies from the University of Chicago and the University of Brussels support that claim, though one 2025 study from the University of Maryland found that Pangram erroneously labeled 2% of documents as AI.

A widely referenced 2023 Stanford study that found AI writing detectors produced higher rates of false positives on writing from non-native English speakers was conducted before Pangram was created. Pangram ran an internal study using a database of non-native English texts and self-reported that false positive rate was around 8 in 10,000.

How do you prove you’re not a machine?

Prior to the emergence of AI writing tools, the cardinal sin of writing was plagiarism. But plagiarism requires two different parties and a measurable accusation. When one author steals another’s words, everyone can judge whether that’s actually the case or not. It’s not that simple with AI writing.

Publishing houses are twitchy about putting out potentially AI-written books and authors are tense about being accused of using AI to write lest they be asked to share their drafts and version history with the entire internet. Social networks are so inundated with AI writing —both real and imagined — that LinkedIn has installed a new post reaction option: “Looks like AI slop.”

Given the thousands upon thousands of pieces of writing published each day, a 1 in 10,000 chance of a false accusation — let alone an 8 in 10,000 chance — means that even the most trusted AI detector is going to be wrong, and wrong about a lot of people.

Pangram isn’t able to tell users the truth about someone’s writing, but it is able to introduce something much more complicated: doubt.

Unless an accused writer confesses to using an LLM, there is no bulletproof way to prove an accusation, short of being given full access to someone’s computer history and finding the chatbot prompts.

The Caine Prize judges said that they would using a “human centered approach” to determine the provenance of Kundieza’s story. Ellah Wakatama, chair of the Caine Prize’s board of trustees, told the BBC that the writer would send his draft history to the organization for review.

While draft version histories are not sacred texts, being asked to share them in exchange for exoneration does introduce some thorny social questions about how much writers need to show an audience — or accuser — in order to be trusted.

And once an accusation is made, there’s no consensus about what evidence would be sufficient to clear an author’s name. When Bryan Armen Graham, a sports editor at The Guardian, was accused of using AI to help him write articles, the publication called the allegations “preposterous.” That didn’t stop several others, including some journalists, from siding with the Pangram results over the word of a colleague.

Either way, a machine wins

To some people and institutions on the literary side, using automated AI writing detectors to fight the influx of AI writing is just trading one form of technological domination for another.

Pangram has entered the public consciousness at a time of distrust that goes beyond writing. “All of this is happening in a larger milieu of bullshit,” said John Warner, the author of “More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.”

The ability to dam at least some of the daily overflow of misinformation and misrepresentation is one of the reasons for Pangram’s success and adoption, but Warner said that comes at a cost.

“Like all other technology of automation, that is going to de-skill people from discerning these things for themselves,” he said.

The Commonwealth Foundation conducted a review of the work of Nazir and the other nominees, but it chose not to use Pangram or other AI detection software in the process.

“Because the tools aren’t conclusive the jury is still out as to how much they can be relied upon,” Razmi Farook, director general of the Commonwealth Foundation, said. “For us, we didn’t want to rely on a singular indicator. We believe the fairest approach is to consider multiple sources of evidence.”

Those sources, Farook said, included the original reading and judging process, along with “supporting documentation” of the writers’ “creative processes, including working drafts, notes, and other relevant materials.” There were also lengthy discussions with each author about how their stories came together. Snippets of those conversations were included in a video promoting the award.

The foundation concluded that none of the writers, including Nazir, had used AI tools to write their stories. But the literary magazine Granta, which had published the story as part of an agreement with the Commonwealth Foundation, canceled its relationship for future competitions. Sigrid Rausing, Granta’s publisher, said in a statement that the magazine fed Nazir’s story into Claude as a way of gauging whether it was written with AI. “The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human,’” wrote Rausing. (Claude is not designed to detect AI writing.)

The statement from Granta was far from conclusive, though, and it summed up the anxious ambivalence that many authors and readers are feeling in the AI age. “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism — we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know,” Rausing wrote. “There is, however, a certain irony in the fact that beyond human hunches AI itself is the most efficient tool we have for revealing what is AI generated.”

Spero was unconvinced by the foundation’s investigation, but offered to take down a case study posted to the Pangram website if they shared the results and he was satisfied with the process. The foundation refused, citing legal and privacy issues. Farook said, however, that her team has asked Pangram for their input on how to secure the award process next year.