"Experimenting, I’ve also found that I can pretty reliably get Pangram to declare large sections of text to be AI-written or human-written depending on the larger textual context I place those sections in - that is, I can take AI-generated text and embed it in human-generated text and have Pangram declare it 100% human, and I can take human-generated text and embed it in AI-generated text and have Pangram declare it 100% AI. I’ve also found that it’s pretty easy to induce false positives, that is, to write texts myself that Pangram identifies as AI-written. All of this makes me hesitant about the Pangram tool, and in particular the way many people use it, as a one-shot gotcha machine."

Sounds like it may be very easy for someone motivated enough to find sections, even longer sections, that turn out as 100% AI written.

Pangram is unreliable on short text, but much more reliable on long form text.

Why would they target these specific 3 black authors? I assume there are hundreds/thousands of successful black authors, 3 "this year" seems very small to call it a targeted attack

If that's the case, unfortunately, they're bound to find legitimate fraud eventually. Given the subsequent hard evidence of plagiarism, it seems like this is one such case, and we can't exactly ignore it.

If I had a book that was hoping to win this award, anonymous accusations like this seem like a pretty easy way to shift the odds. It's impossible for the author to disprove the allegations and the award committee will want to 'avoid controversy'

[1] https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/litterature/2026-09-23/thelyson...