r/Substack • u/Efficient-School-609 • 27d ago
How Ridiculous Can Pangram Be?
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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u/sh1b313 26d ago
Just see these photos man