There is a lot of dislike for AI detection in these comments. Pangram labs (PL) claims very low false positive rates. Here's their own blog post on the research:
https://www.pangram.com/blog/pangram-predicts-21-of-iclr-rev...I increasingly see AI generated slop across the internet - on twitter, nytimes comments, blog/substack posts from smart people. Most of it is obvious AI garbage and it's really f*ing annoying. It largely has the same obnoxious style and really bad analogies. Here's an (impossible to realize) proposal: any time AI-generated text is used, we should get to see the whole interaction chain that led to its production. It would be like a student writing an essay who asks a parent or friend for help revising it. There's clearly a difference between revisions and substantial content contribution.
The notion that AI is ready to be producing research or peer reviews is just dumb. If AI correctly identifies flaws in a paper, the paper was probably real trash. Much of the time, errors are quite subtle. When I review, after I write my review and identify subtle issues, I pass the paper through AI. It rarely finds the subtle issues. (Not unlike a time it tried to debug my code and spent all its time focused on an entirely OK floating point comparison.)
For anecdotal issues with PL: I am working on a 500 word conference abstract. I spent a long while working on it but then dropped it into opus 4.5 to see what would happen. It made very minimal changes to the actual writing, but the abstract (to me) reads a lot better even with its minimal rearrangements. That surprises me. (But again, these were very minimal rearrangements: I provided ~550 words and got back a slightly reduced, 450 words.) Perhaps more interestingly, PL's characterizations are unstable. If I check the original claude output, I get "fully AI-generated, medium". If I drop in my further refined version (where I clean up claude's output), I get fully human. Some of the aspects which PL says characterize the original as AI-generated (particular n-grams in the text) are actually from my original work.
The realities are these:
a) ai content sucks (especially in style);
b) people will continue to use AI (often to produce crap) because doing real work is hard and everyone else is "sprinting ahead" using the semi-undetectable (or at least plausibly deniable) ai garbage;
c) slowly the style of AI will almost certainly infect the writing style of actual people (ugh) - this is probably already happening; I think I can feel it in my own writing sometimes;
d) AI detection may not always work, but AI-generated content is definitely proliferating. This *is* a problem, but in the long run we likely have few solutions.