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I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

freddiedeboer.substack.com

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Re: I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

#31

Post by coldtea »

johnfn wrote: post #26
embedding-shape wrote: post #3

> If I want to induce a false positive in TSA's airport scanner, I can put a gun-shaped object in my bag. If I want to induce a false positive in Waymo's stop sign detection system, I can paint my own sign and put it up on a pole. Holy strawman-batman, not only does the founder of Pangram not have a proper response to the actual criticisms, he feels the need to completely make up very different situations to try to i…

Pangram said a bunch of reasonable things and responded very coherently to the point and you skipped over it and misinterpreted this one section.

What he said amounts to "you're holding it wrong".

Re: I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

#32

Post by runako »

This product does not even have a plausible theory of how it could work.

LLM-generated text does not carry a watermark or other identifying marks. The "theory" is that an LLM trained on human writing, to mimic human writing, can be distinguished from actual human writing in under 100 words.

Notably the first diagram on the research overview page (https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works) shows feedback for "misclassified human examples." This is a category error; Pangram will not find out when it has misclassified text in the wild, except in rare cases. Only the "licensed human-written text" in its training data can be used as feedback.

Scams like Pangram also cause real harms, mostly because laypeople do not understand that what is being offered is not possible. Pangram advertises 99.98% accuracy, and they pitch it as a tool for teachers and universities. Translated: if a college like University of Alabama rolled this out, you could expect ~40 students to have their lives upended by this snake oil, every year. (And how can one even prove that an allegation is false, that they did write a given text?) And this is the best case, using the number on Pangram's homepage.

Re: I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

#33

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

timpera wrote: post #6

I recently tried Pangram, created an account, wrote a few lines about how my day went, and it was flagged as likely AI-assisted. It clearly doesn't work. It's especially bad that they keep insisting that it works very well, because thousands of people will probably end up falsely accused of AI usage as a result.

If Pangram worked the AI companies would be using it to improve their models

Re: I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

#34

Post by btown »

It frustrates me that AI detection for student essays effectively works as a protection racket: if a student wants to write an essay without AI assistance and reliably get credit for doing so, they still need to pay a company like Pangram for an individual account to ensure their own work isn't accidentally flagged (especially if checking multiple drafts a day).

And even this isn't perfect, nor is it guaranteed that enterprise and individual accounts are tuned the same way. So students also need to proactively use audit/keystroke logging systems to protect themselves against accusations, which creates a type of "panopticon" on one's early/ephemeral drafts, including language of frustration (who among us hasn't typed curses into an unsaved draft at some point?), that can massively stifle creative thought. And if an institution provides such a tool, their centralized access simply worsens the "panopticon" characteristics.

There's no easy solution, here, sadly.

Re: I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

#35

Post by skippyfish »

embedding-shape wrote: post #18
skippyfish wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm asking the parent about their claim. I already have an opinion about the parent post, in which the author is claiming to have not used an LLM to author a 2025 essay that's illustrated with completely unnecessary AI art. Although one doesn't imply the other, let's say that this diminishes my willingness to believe that claim at face value.

What about the piece the author wrote in 2017 and because of an addition of 23% AI generated text, Pangram labelled it as 100% AI written?

That's not relevant at all. I'm asking for human-written text that gets flagged by Pangram as AI-generated, not an artificially-constructed case that contains AI text (and was explained by the founder of the website as essentially a block resolution issue).

Re: I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

#37

Post by johnfn »

coldtea wrote: post #31
johnfn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pangram said a bunch of reasonable things and responded very coherently to the point and you skipped over it and misinterpreted this one section.

What he said amounts to "you're holding it wrong".

The response says "I also believe we can do better". How is that in any way "you're holding it wrong"?

Re: I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

#38

Post by Smaug123 »

runako wrote: post #32

This product does not even have a plausible theory of how it could work. LLM-generated text does not carry a watermark or other identifying marks. The "theory" is that an LLM trained on human writing, to mimic human writing, can be distinguished from actual human writing in under 100 words. Notably the first diagram on the research overview page ( https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works ) shows feedback for "mi…

Claude, a general-purpose model, can identify me, personally with stylometry in about 200 words. Is it really such a stretch to believe it’s possible for a special-purpose model to identify the ten or so main LLMs crossed with the fifty or so main styles people gave them write in?

Re: I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

#39

Post by supermatt »

I think the problem is that pangram doesn't actually work on the whole document - it works on chunks of the document.

By analysing a specific piece of prose you probably arent using the same chunk as would otherwise be analysed and can end up with a different result.

Re: I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle

#40

Post by phoghed »

zahlman wrote: post #21
phoghed wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the OP you goofball, there’s examples right there in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "Th…

The first one maybe, the second one no.
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