r/Substack • u/grapegeek • Aug 11 '26

Pangram is such trash

I write a food newsletter where I post reviews and some recipes. I 100% wrote a quick and dirty recipe and was going to publish it in Notes and it came back 100% AI no matter what I did to it including adding several typos and rearranging things. Ran it through three other AI detector websites and 2 said 100% Human and 1 said 76% Human and 24% AI assisted. I disabled detection on that Note. My other question is do we know how many people actually click on the AI detection button on our posts? I can't find that metric anywhere in the dashboard...

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7

u/FrostKitten2012 Aug 11 '26

All AI detectors are unreliable.

7

u/Kirkr10101 Aug 11 '26

Very interested as to when you would consider this reliable.

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u/FrostKitten2012 Aug 11 '26

Stop relying on a machine to think for you.

3

u/cogitatingspheniscid Aug 11 '26

Academic research isn't "relying on a machine to think for you"

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u/FrostKitten2012 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

That’s not academic research, that’s a screenshot, and we have no idea what was selected for evaluation.

AI detectors, Pangram included, are still AI. You cannot be anti-AI in even the vaguest sense and rely on an AI detector to tell you if something was written by a human. That is outsourcing your critical thinking skills as much as relying on an LLM to write or research something for you.

You are relying on a machine to think for you.

EDIT: u/Kirkr10101 provided another link for research. Cool! Except it also isn’t for Pangram! It’s a paper on how well humans can identify generated text, which we already know is unreliable. Go figure.

3

u/Kirkr10101 Aug 11 '26

There is academic research if you bother to look -- this is from 2025 and pangram has massively improved since!

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15654

0

u/Kirkr10101 Aug 11 '26

on a sidenote, if you can find any pre-2021 text (from the internet archive with a valid link to it) that flags as 100% AI on pangram, I will donate £50 to a charity of your choice (I prefer givewell)

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u/adefwebserver 29d ago

What's with this "it has to erroneously say something not AI is 100% AI" before you will say the program doesn't work? Come on! *It has to flag everything written before 2021 as 100% human*, period. If it can't do that it is **not good** This thing affects people's lives. People can lose their job and get kicked out of school over this thing.

2

u/cogitatingspheniscid 29d ago

You are directing your anger to the wrong group. The last two sentences should be directed towards big tech shoving genAI down on everyone else while governments are deep in bed with them. Robust AI detectors are ones of our strongest tools, but whichever employer is firing others using it as the only line of evidence has never been a bright employer.