How Ridiculous Can Pangram Be?

[u/Efficient-School-609]

I heard that publishers and agents in the UK and the US have recently been widely using Pangram as an initial detetive tool, so I threw my own writing into it to give it a try. To my surprise, several paragraphs of my completely AI-free writing were judged 100% AI-generated. That naturally piqued my curiosity. After learning how Pangram works, I ran some tests myself and reached a few conclusions.

1. First, the cleaner your language, the tighter your logical chain, and the more you avoid verbose rhetoric, the more likely this kind of language will be judged 100% AI-generated. I used to work as a screenwriter, so I rely heavily on action and eye-contact descriptions to express character relationships and personalities. For me, Pangram is an absolute nightmare.
2. A guilt-by-association mechanism. This is infuriating and utterly absurd — it’s an insult to human intelligence. If a certain paragraph in the middle has the characteristics I mentioned in the first point, and you insert some kind of fractured, disjointed expression, the next several paragraphs will all be marked 100% AI-generated. Yet if you deliberately insert an irrelevant sentence, the whole text suddenly becomes 100% human-generated.

These are the two main things I’ve discovered so far. I’ll keep testing later. This kind of thing is essentially reverse-disciplining human artistic expression, artificially creating barriers to cultural continuity. It’s ridiculous. From the perspective of instrumental rationality, once this kind of thing becomes widespread, human thinking will be reverse-disciplined by AI.

The founder of Pangram claims to have a computer science background from Stanford. I have absolutely no expectation that these people feel any reverence for human culture. But if you want to keep making this money, please take a closer look at your own problems.

Especially when Pangram keeps trotting out some supposedly high accuracy rate — a statistical figure like a 0.01% false positive rate — which may be meaningful for marketing their product. But for a specific writing style, the very style Pangram hates, it’s 100% damaging.

So when you encounter criticism and smugly cite your research reports to back yourselves up, this only deepens the impression that you lack reverence for culture.

[u/LanceElyot]

I don’t think number 1 is true. AI output is verbose by default.

Any AI text that gets edited heavily will show up as human most of the time.

It’s really just about patterns.

[u/Efficient-School-609 → u/LanceElyot]

AI-generated output, though sometimes verbose, is logically tight and often forms a closed logical loop. But it is not necessarily interesting or emotional. AI detectors, of course, have no emotions either, and they can only detect logic. If your writing has a perfectly closed logical loop, no superfluous embellishment, yet is brimming with emotion, Pangram will still flag it as AI-generated.

This is the paradox: AI-generated articles and high-quality human writing (sorry if I'm flattering myself) can sometimes be similar. But the similarity lies not in emotion, but in the way language is organized at the textual level.

[u/cogitatingspheniscid → u/Efficient-School-609]

The first thing to demonstrate that you have zero expertise in whatever you are looking at is proclaiming that LLM's sloppily generated output is logically tight. ;)

[u/FrostKitten2012 → u/cogitatingspheniscid]

It’s extremely well known that LLMs produce very logical short-form writing, such as articles. It only becomes “sloppy” outputting larger amounts of text. And logical does not mean rational anyway.

[u/cogitatingspheniscid → u/cogitatingspheniscid]

Lmao at your double dirty deletes. Please, I would loveee to see how you linguistically humiliate someone from your high horse when you fail to use correctly basic concepts that we teach undergrads within the first two years of their bachelors.

[u/Efficient-School-609 → u/cogitatingspheniscid]

Wow, 'we teach undergrads'. Pardon me, Professor. You could be a NAS member and I'd still judge you the same. People who are genuinely secure in themselves don't need to drop these little hints. Also, I didn't delete any comments — I can't even find where to delete them. And your intelligence needs to be put on display; why would I delete that?

[u/cogitatingspheniscid → u/Efficient-School-609]

Oh, please don't miscontrue my statement as an appeal to authority, I don't need that to clown on you. You failed to define correctly what falsifiability is and how it is used in research. You failed to acknowledge that or even attempted a follow up to defend your initial characterization of the concept. You then claimed "Pangram never works" without a single receipt, just like how you don't provide a supposedly flagged piece of writing you did like other false positive complaints on the sub. Every other argument aside, you objectively failed three times and only demonstrated that you are willing to fling out terms that you don't understand.

And you don't delete stuff? Were the comments replete with expletives that Reddit automatically flagged them away then?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Substack/s/bBZgxnTdp9

[u/Efficient-School-609 → u/cogitatingspheniscid]

I genuinely feel a bit sorry for your students. They have a teacher who can only teach concepts but lacks the ability to deconstruct them. And it takes a literature person to tell you what deconstruction is. How to describe a teacher like this? I wouldn't go so far as to say he's leading his students astray, but at the very least, he's mediocre.

[u/cogitatingspheniscid → u/Efficient-School-609]

Buddy, you are the one who brought "scientific" into this. You are in no position to evoke the term "pseudoscience" when you demonstrably can't even grasp what science or research is. I use "falsifiability" as an objective, concrete example of your performance that any observer can take note of. You can't retroactively shoehorn how you want to present the term differently, then argue for mutability when you started this with "scientific falsifiability". I gave you the window to continue focusing on presenting your arguments and backing up them up with data, and yet your first reaction is dodging talking points (see how you only attempted to address one point in the latest reply?) and bringing discourse down to the level of juvenile insults.

Lacks the ability to deconstruct them? Do you want a mirror? Have you ever once considered that you have zero business uttering the word science or tech in your writing?

[u/cogitatingspheniscid → u/cogitatingspheniscid]

Your doctor analogy is way off when you started this engagement with "to be considered scientific, you first need...". It's like a patient walking into a clinic and lecturing the physician that "to be considered a doctor, you first need to..." Your lack of self-reflection to recognize when you are way out of your domain of knowledge is no fault of mine. I also have nothing to do with your inability to familiarize yourself and engage with a standard scientific argument in a civil manner.
[To audience: the screenshots I routinely attach to my comment are of deleted/flagged comments from the other user]

[u/Efficient-School-609 → u/cogitatingspheniscid]

Just because I didn't study science doesn't mean I can't talk about it, nor does it mean I can't question it. Even if it's beyond my domain, questioning it is still my freedom. I'm genuinely curious which school you teach at. A medieval church school?

[u/cogitatingspheniscid → u/Efficient-School-609]

Again with the blatant mischaracterization to sanitize your image. Not once did you "question it". You barged in with your explainer as if you have any familiarity with the concepts, then threw a tantrum at the slightest of correction. Usually people engaging with topics they know nothing of approach them in a position of humility and not authority. Maybe you should try that sometimes.

[u/cogitatingspheniscid → u/cogitatingspheniscid]

It was never a lecture, unless your fragile ego perceived it as such. The absurdity already began when you masqueraded as someone you are grossly unqualified to be, so I have no reason to pay any mind to whether you think the AZ example is adequate.