3 ms·

I'm curious about your thoughts on pangram. I only really see posts on Reddit claiming it falsely labels their content as ai generated but nobody will actually

by wrsh07 2mo ago

I'm curious about your thoughts on pangram. I only really see posts on Reddit claiming it falsely labels their content as ai generated but nobody will actually post examples of "textbook from twenty years ago" or upload screenshots of a journal (also those posts usually feel deeply ai generated without an ai detector) Do you think this is an impossible task and we shouldn't try to solve it? Or do you think it's doable and that some ai detectors might be better than others?

nemomarx 2mo ago
This feels testable - you could go to fanfiction or similar sites with billions of words of writing from before 2016 or so and run them through it. I tried a chapter just now and got human doing that, but I'm not invested enough to run a hundred samples today. But it sounds like it would be an alright way to audit it? I will confess I'm pretty skeptical you could ever eliminate false positives here though. I can often get an ai sense from some writing on my own but I doubt it would be better than 90% accurate, and "ai plus human editing" might screw with that anyway, stuff like that. I would have preferred we just never developed this kind of thing so I wouldn't have to guess.
- StilesCrisis 2mo ago
  It's been done and showed up on HN recently. Older content was quite consistently marked as not-AI.
- philote 2mo ago
  That still might work better with older texts. As AI-generated text gets more prevalent, I'm guessing people will start subconsciously adopting AI writing styles.
  - nemomarx 2mo ago
    Yeah, that's one of my questions. Everyone who talks to AI for too long seems to get worse at writing anyway, and humans mirror any form of conversation to some extent.
  - subsistence234 2mo ago
    LLMS aren't the only thing that has changed over time in the way texts are written. if they used older texts as training data, to some extent pangram would just be an age classifier for writing style.
nunez 2mo ago
pangram is pretty good; i use it all of the time and pay for it. surprised that it's not mentioned that often here. they just released a new model that is supposed to lower the fpr (false positive rate) even further than it's already impossibly low score. it also detects AI in images now, though I expect the fpr to be pretty high there given its newness.
tantalor 2mo ago
Pangram has their FP rate and FN rate rates here: https://www.pangram.com/research/model-card/pangram-4 https://www.pangram.com/research/model-card/pangram-4 > Pangram 4 achieves a 0.0041% false positive rate (roughly 1 in 24,000) on 1,000,000 human-written English FineWeb evaluation examples > Overall False Negative Rate is 0.3396% on English AI generations (26 generator models)
estebarb 2mo ago
Language distribution shifts. Eventually people will start adopting the distribution used by LLMs, making classification harder. Also, this doesn't even consider the case where people use LLMs to translate their original works. Or people that use it for spelling/grammar checks. Personally, I believe these checkers do more harm than good. Any false positive can ruin someones life.
- jmalicki 2mo ago
  > Eventually people will start adopting the distribution used by LLMs, making classification harder. I recently heard someone say "that's genuinely the exact solution I was looking for" and had to do a double take.

by wrsh07 2mo ago

nemomarx 2mo ago

This feels testable - you could go to fanfiction or similar sites with billions of words of writing from before 2016 or so and run them through it. I tried a chapter just now and got human doing that, but I'm not invested enough to run a hundred samples today. But it sounds like it would be an alright way to audit it? I will confess I'm pretty skeptical you could ever eliminate false positives here though. I can often get an ai sense from some writing on my own but I doubt it would be better than 90% accurate, and "ai plus human editing" might screw with that anyway, stuff like that. I would have preferred we just never developed this kind of thing so I wouldn't have to guess.

StilesCrisis 2mo ago
It's been done and showed up on HN recently. Older content was quite consistently marked as not-AI.
philote 2mo ago
That still might work better with older texts. As AI-generated text gets more prevalent, I'm guessing people will start subconsciously adopting AI writing styles.
- nemomarx 2mo ago
  Yeah, that's one of my questions. Everyone who talks to AI for too long seems to get worse at writing anyway, and humans mirror any form of conversation to some extent.
- subsistence234 2mo ago
  LLMS aren't the only thing that has changed over time in the way texts are written. if they used older texts as training data, to some extent pangram would just be an age classifier for writing style.

nunez 2mo ago

pangram is pretty good; i use it all of the time and pay for it. surprised that it's not mentioned that often here. they just released a new model that is supposed to lower the fpr (false positive rate) even further than it's already impossibly low score. it also detects AI in images now, though I expect the fpr to be pretty high there given its newness.

tantalor 2mo ago

Pangram has their FP rate and FN rate rates here: https://www.pangram.com/research/model-card/pangram-4 https://www.pangram.com/research/model-card/pangram-4 > Pangram 4 achieves a 0.0041% false positive rate (roughly 1 in 24,000) on 1,000,000 human-written English FineWeb evaluation examples > Overall False Negative Rate is 0.3396% on English AI generations (26 generator models)

estebarb 2mo ago

Language distribution shifts. Eventually people will start adopting the distribution used by LLMs, making classification harder. Also, this doesn't even consider the case where people use LLMs to translate their original works. Or people that use it for spelling/grammar checks. Personally, I believe these checkers do more harm than good. Any false positive can ruin someones life.

jmalicki 2mo ago
> Eventually people will start adopting the distribution used by LLMs, making classification harder. I recently heard someone say "that's genuinely the exact solution I was looking for" and had to do a double take.