Caine Prize finds no evidence winning story was written with AI
The Caine Prize for African Writing has found no evidence that Simbarashe Kundizeza used generative AI, software that produces text from prompts, to write his winning short story. Ellah Wakatama, chair of the prize's board of trustees, said after a detailed investigation that "The Blue Fighter was human written."
Kundizeza, a Zimbabwean writer, was confirmed as the winner of the prize's £10,000 ($13,000) award. The story follows a boy whose family falls on hard times.
The investigation followed an article in The Atlantic headlined "Yet Another Literary Prizewinner Seems to Be AI." Its author, Vauhini Vara, alleged that Pangram, an AI-detection software tool, showed the story was entirely AI-generated. Kundizeza denied the allegation that he used AI.
The prize's review included interviews with Kundizeza, the 2026 judging panel and Shallow Tales Review, the publication where the story first appeared. It also included independent and expert-led analysis of metadata, the background data recorded about files, from drafts written by Kundizeza.
Vara told BBC Front Row, the broadcaster's arts programme, that every other previous Caine Prize-winning story she had put through Pangram came out as 100% human.
Kundizeza said he was inspired by a poem read by South African Vangile Gantsho at an event in Ghana about her father's obsession with building fish tanks.
