Post

People have real qualms with AI detectors, and so do I, but the evidence is mounting that Pangram in particular very rarely gets it wrong (especially on longer chunks of text, but increasingly even on short ones). @brianx.bsky.social tested it and it didn't miss: www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/t...

nytimes.comI Tested a Popular A.I. Slop Detector. It Felt Empowering.Pangram excels at distinguishing chatbot-generated words from human writing. But it’s not reliable for spotting artificial images.

AI detectors rightly got a bad rap because they got it wrong often enough to be worse than useless — actively harmful. Pangram has a different algorithm that by all accounts simply works much better. I'd still be wary of basing an accusation on Pangram alone, but... www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/b...

The case for using Pangram as at least an indicator of likely AI writing is much stronger than it was for Turnitin/GPTZero. Its widespread use would also deter a lot of folks from even trying to pass off AI slop as authentic. Is that enough to justify it, or is any nonzero error rate intolerable?

It might sound like a rhetorical question but I'm genuinely interested in how folks answer it. Obviously purveyors of AI writing don't want this. But what about people who hate AI slop but also disapprove of AI use in general, or worry deeply about false accusations? How do you weigh the tradeoff?

This is a great question. I'd love to see research on Pangram's accuracy for non-native speakers specifically. Logically its error rate couldn't be *that* high or else its overall error rate couldn't be so miniscule. But any amount of bias makes the tool's use problematic from a fairness standpoint.

This post is unavailable.

Well, it could be if there just isn't much (or any) non-native English in the test sets...

0 reposts0 likes

No replies yet.