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Scanning for Pangram Errors

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Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#21

Post by vidarh »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #16
vidarh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think outside of a few niche uses, e.g. schools/universities, services like Pangram will struggle. Currently people care because so much of AI output is still poor quality. But given I personally know of someone with published AI-generated works where the reviews are gushing and positive across the board, I doubt people will care whether works are AI generated for very long vs whether the text is good . A way of ce…

I actually disagree, I think B people care a lot if a created work is an intended artistic thing vs produced by a machine. It’s like the difference between getting someone a generic hallmark cards vs actually writing something inside. Theres a place for the hallmarks but a plain one with no human touch is still considered tacky

Survey people about who created a given work, and you'll find a whole lot of people who like something without having the faintest clue who made it, or anything about why, before even considering the people who can even name the people involved. It's hard to believe that suggest people are so quick to care about the artistic merit.

As a concrete example relating to books, the success of the Stratemeyer Syndicate in packaging up book series ghostwritten by "nameless" authors under single pseudonyms is an example. Stratemeyer series like Nancy Drew has sold more than 80 million copies (for Nancy Drew alone). At one point 98% of American children listed a Stratemeyer title as their most popular books.

How many of those do you think saw those works - most sold as a work for hire for next to nothing and churned out by the hundreds - as "an intended artistic thing"?

People who care a lot about literature tends to seriously overestimate how readers engage with writing. As it stands it's hard to get people to care enough to read, much less to get them to care about artistic intent.

I think people who bet on people caring about that as a means to stem the tide of AI content will be very disappointed.

Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#22

Post by tantalor »

cubefox wrote: post #11

Note that any good binary classifier (like "this is AI writing" for Pangram) should maximize the following four probabilities: 1. P(actually true | predicted true) (= true positive rate, recall, sensitivity) 2. P(actually false | predicted false) (= true negative rate, specificity) 3. P(predicted true | actually true) (= positive predictive value, precision) 4. P(predicted false | actually false) (= negative predicti…

They report false negative rate (FNR) here:

https://www.pangram.com/research/model-card/pangram-3-3

  Academic Writing  FNR=0.00%  N=48443
  Creative Writing  FNR=0.23%  N=41940
  RAID              FNR=0.93%  N=66855
Recall = 1 - FNR

Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#23

Post by ActivePattern »

pinnate wrote: post #20

I’m a teacher that requires students to write, so I’m always on the lookout for reliable AI detection. Haven’t anything close to reliable yet, but Pangram definitely seemed to be better than anything else in my (very limited) tests. That said, it did incorrectly flag something that I personally wrote as AI, which baffled me. I spent a while playing around with the text and feeding it back into Pangram, trying to figu…

It's interesting that it cares about formatting choices like bullet points.

On the one hand, it makes the system more brittle and arguably overfit, since it's not making a decision on the content of the writing itself. Most people would say that AI writing is still AI writing even if bullet points are removed, and vice versa.

On the other hand, we know that AI writing does has a very specific formatting signature (e.g. em-dashes, bullet points) so it seems unwise to completely ignore it.

Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#24

Post by MisterTea »

ActivePattern wrote: post #23
pinnate wrote: post #20

I’m a teacher that requires students to write, so I’m always on the lookout for reliable AI detection. Haven’t anything close to reliable yet, but Pangram definitely seemed to be better than anything else in my (very limited) tests. That said, it did incorrectly flag something that I personally wrote as AI, which baffled me. I spent a while playing around with the text and feeding it back into Pangram, trying to figu…

It's interesting that it cares about formatting choices like bullet points. On the one hand, it makes the system more brittle and arguably overfit, since it's not making a decision on the content of the writing itself. Most people would say that AI writing is still AI writing even if bullet points are removed, and vice versa. On the other hand, we know that AI writing does has a very specific formatting signature (e.…

> It's interesting that it cares about formatting choices like bullet points.

Since AI I have noticed a lot of sudden bulleted lists appearing in pretty benign forum posts. That along with "You are right" "You are correct" "you're right" as the response.

Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#25

Post by Aurornis »

pinnate wrote: post #20

I’m a teacher that requires students to write, so I’m always on the lookout for reliable AI detection. Haven’t anything close to reliable yet, but Pangram definitely seemed to be better than anything else in my (very limited) tests. That said, it did incorrectly flag something that I personally wrote as AI, which baffled me. I spent a while playing around with the text and feeding it back into Pangram, trying to figu…

The tools will never be perfectly reliable. It’s good that people like you are aware that it’s a statistical tool, not a perfect oracle.

For student work I would think it’s reasonable to look for patterns across each student’s work. A single Pangram positive across 10 assignments shouldn’t be enough to bring suspicion upon a student, but when 8 out of 10 of someone’s assignments are coming up as AI it’s time to talk.

The trend I’m hearing from my teacher friends is that students are generating AI papers and then putting them into tools like ZeroGPT and Pangram before submission. They do what you did: Remove sections, rewrite things, and make adjustments until the AI score goes down enough.

I heard that one classroom had developed a trick of adding spelling mistakes to ChatGPT output to try to make it look human written. So the teacher was getting pure AI slop but every paragraph had a couple typos inserted.

As for the 3 bullet points: That was a huge tell for one of the recent popular models. Almost all writing output would get sections of plus or minus 3 bullet points in a certain style. The newer frontier models do it less but that was a big LLM pattern for a while. Unfortunate for anyone who liked to write with 3 bullet points commonly. They’re feeling the pain of people who were emdash enjoyers before 2023

Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#26

Post by NitpickLawyer »

Aurornis wrote: post #25
pinnate wrote: post #20

I’m a teacher that requires students to write, so I’m always on the lookout for reliable AI detection. Haven’t anything close to reliable yet, but Pangram definitely seemed to be better than anything else in my (very limited) tests. That said, it did incorrectly flag something that I personally wrote as AI, which baffled me. I spent a while playing around with the text and feeding it back into Pangram, trying to figu…

The tools will never be perfectly reliable. It’s good that people like you are aware that it’s a statistical tool, not a perfect oracle. For student work I would think it’s reasonable to look for patterns across each student’s work. A single Pangram positive across 10 assignments shouldn’t be enough to bring suspicion upon a student, but when 8 out of 10 of someone’s assignments are coming up as AI it’s time to talk.…

> I would think it’s reasonable to look for patterns across each student’s work. A single Pangram

Strong disagree here. If a tool fails the basic test of teacher getting flagged on some text that they wrote personally, that tool should never be used. Being accused of cheating can have huge repercussions on a student's future. No way should a black-box classifier be used to decide their fate.

Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#27

Post by tantalor »

Ukv wrote: post #9

> Pangram boasts a false positive rate of 1 in a 10,000. That is, if Pangram says a block of text is AI there is only a one in ten thousand chance that it was written by a human. That'd be if they had a false discovery rate of 1/10,000. If for instance: * 100,000 samples are tested * 100 of which are AI-generated, the rest human-written * Pangram flags 50 of the AI-generated samples (true positives) * Pangram also fl…

In your scenario,

  False negatives = 50
  False negative rate = FN / (TP + FN) = 50 / (50 + 50) = 50%
Their actual FNR is much better than 50%, more like 1% at worst.

Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#28

Post by Aurornis »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #26
Aurornis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools will never be perfectly reliable. It’s good that people like you are aware that it’s a statistical tool, not a perfect oracle. For student work I would think it’s reasonable to look for patterns across each student’s work. A single Pangram positive across 10 assignments shouldn’t be enough to bring suspicion upon a student, but when 8 out of 10 of someone’s assignments are coming up as AI it’s time to talk.…

> I would think it’s reasonable to look for patterns across each student’s work. A single Pangram Strong disagree here. If a tool fails the basic test of teacher getting flagged on some text that they wrote personally, that tool should never be used. Being accused of cheating can have huge repercussions on a student's future. No way should a black-box classifier be used to decide their fate.

I said we shouldn't penalize students for single positives. That's bad use of statistics.

It's also bad use of statistics to claim that an indicator can never be used unless it's 100% perfect. When you start accumulating constant triggers, you do a deeper investigation.

For example, bring the student in and give them a surprise (no preparation) quiz about the paper they submitted. The students who wrote the paper can talk about what they wrote. The students who submitted ChatGPT usually can't.

You don't just put the paper into Pangram and then let it decide if the student gets punished based on the score.

Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#29

Post by bakugo »

vidarh wrote: post #12
Aurornis wrote: post #5

Interesting methodology. The results for Pangram are surprisingly good. These tools are definitely not 100% perfect, which is the primary complaint used to dismiss them. However the error rate is also getting impressively low. In most cases I see socially and online, there is a high suspicion that the content is AI generated before someone thinks to submit it to Pangram. It’s used on-demand as a tool to confirm suspi…

I think outside of a few niche uses, e.g. schools/universities, services like Pangram will struggle. Currently people care because so much of AI output is still poor quality. But given I personally know of someone with published AI-generated works where the reviews are gushing and positive across the board, I doubt people will care whether works are AI generated for very long vs whether the text is good . A way of ce…

> Currently people care because so much of AI output is still poor quality. But given I personally know of someone with published AI-generated works where the reviews are gushing and positive across the board, I doubt people will care whether works are AI generated for very long vs whether the text is good.

I think this has less to do with the quality of the text and more to do with whether people have standards or not.

For every person who reads a paragraph of AI text and is instantly disgusted, there are probably 10 or more people who will gladly read pages upon pages of the sloppiest slop imaginable copy-pasted straight from chatgpt.com without batting an eye. That's just how things are, most people have very low standards.

Getting any of the current codemaxxed models to output natural text without obvious AI-isms is not an easy feat, and I doubt this person you mentioned has somehow cracked the case.

Re: Scanning for Pangram Errors

#30

Post by vidarh »

bakugo wrote: post #29
vidarh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think outside of a few niche uses, e.g. schools/universities, services like Pangram will struggle. Currently people care because so much of AI output is still poor quality. But given I personally know of someone with published AI-generated works where the reviews are gushing and positive across the board, I doubt people will care whether works are AI generated for very long vs whether the text is good . A way of ce…

> Currently people care because so much of AI output is still poor quality. But given I personally know of someone with published AI-generated works where the reviews are gushing and positive across the board, I doubt people will care whether works are AI generated for very long vs whether the text is good. I think this has less to do with the quality of the text and more to do with whether people have standards or n…

I've seen the text, and it was genre typical.

You get 80% of the way there just by giving them a writing sample and asking them to copy the style paragraph by paragraph. You get a lot further with some basic statistics to look for seriously out of distribution word use.

The hard problem isn't prose, but consistency over a long text.

I don't know how he's achieved that, but I've seen the reviews and none complained about consistency issues, which readers tend to be sticklers about.

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