Chinwendu Nwangwa

Finally, some chutzpah from Caine Prize. When this story first broke, I made my position clear, and I have seen no reason to change it. The Atlantic writer, whom I will not honour by mentioning her name because she is that much of a nonentity, struck me as a jealous, bitter, deeply unpleasant individual whose only apparent interest was to cast African writers in a negative light. I also described The Atlantic as a harebrained, vilely racist gossip mill masquerading as an editorial powerhouse, and I stand by that assessment. When Simbarashe was announced as this year's winner, they couldn't bring themselves to congratulate him, but were remarkably quick to publish a piece that suggested he had used AI to write his story. A publication so eager to cast suspicion on an African writer's achievement deserves to be called what it actually is: a bunch of useless individuals who delight in putting African writers down. And this should serve as a lesson to all those idiots who somehow believe that African writers, in particular, are, without the use of AI, incapable of producing award-winning stories, and who are so quick to assume that exceptional writing must be the product of a machine. I hope you godforsaken, thoughtless troglodytes can now appreciate that African writers are perfectly capable of producing remarkable work through their own talent, imagination and craftsmanship, and that neither Pangram nor any other AI detector has the authority to pronounce a piece of writing AI-generated. These tools are fallible, their conclusions are not proof, and their assessments should never, ever be treated as the final word on a writer's authorship.