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Hi Bryan, I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your fai

by nkurz 28d ago

Hi Bryan, I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human? In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-is-broken-but https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i... What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?

bcantrill 28d ago
My experience is using Pangram quite often with lots of writing of all flavors (including a bunch of known origin). As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 years, all 176 (well, 177 now with my latest) are 100% human. This is not hugely surprising in that (in addition to me having actually written them!) my voice is very... distinctive. What would be more entertaining would be to try to get an LLM to write like me and fool Pangram that way. I still think that this would be difficult based on the experiences that I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could pull it off (and I would assuredly find the result entertaining!). In the dimensions that we use Pangram in the most actionable sense (namely, to audit our own public writing), I am unconcerned about false positives, and leave it to Oxide authors to rework/recast as needed. (Though it sounds like Freddie didn't even need to do that -- he just needed to provide a longer sample.)
- Barbing 28d ago
  Now that you’ve seen it can be brittle (e.g. if a small sample is provided, per this single case), would it be sensible to add a disclaimer to the post? It’s a great ad for the tool (& I’d love for a perfect tool to exist!), so it’ll sell subscriptions & we wanna make sure that some teacher out there doesn’t falsely accuse a kid, or engineer doesn’t think worse of their colleague unfairly, etc. False negatives are mentioned, but the false positive is what could hurt people. To human writing. Thank you!
ahepp 28d ago
>I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this Maybe I'm taking the "all" too literally here, but I read the article, and I'm not seeing anywhere the author ran a substantial portion of his corpus through Pangram to determine the false positive rate. That would be really interesting to see. He does * give an example of a piece of his writing that was, when ran in segments, flagged as generated (which he disputes) * multiply the size of his corpus by pangram's published false positive rate and estimate that a few of his pieces would be flagged * get the pangram model to label a piece "100% AI" when it only has 3 generated sentences * demonstrate the ability to intentionally trigger a false positive
scruple 27d ago
I just typed 233 words into Pangram, I'm trying to synthesize an idea from Aristotle to an experience I am having at work. It's not an original thought, specifically, but the application to this thing at work does appear to be novel. I'm still trying to work out my thoughts. Anyway it concluded that it's 100% AI. Even with a couple of random typos and missing grammar that I added. Smells like horse shit to me. I also don't like the idea that I have to shove a corpus of text into this thing to get it to process that it's incorrect. That expectation is wrong headed and places the burden on the wrong entity.

by nkurz 28d ago

bcantrill 28d ago

My experience is using Pangram quite often with lots of writing of all flavors (including a bunch of known origin). As for my own writing, I didn't do this experiment, but one of my co-workers did -- and over 176 posts spanning 22 years, all 176 (well, 177 now with my latest) are 100% human. This is not hugely surprising in that (in addition to me having actually written them!) my voice is very... distinctive. What would be more entertaining would be to try to get an LLM to write like me and fool Pangram that way. I still think that this would be difficult based on the experiences that I've heard, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could pull it off (and I would assuredly find the result entertaining!). In the dimensions that we use Pangram in the most actionable sense (namely, to audit our own public writing), I am unconcerned about false positives, and leave it to Oxide authors to rework/recast as needed. (Though it sounds like Freddie didn't even need to do that -- he just needed to provide a longer sample.)

Barbing 28d ago
Now that you’ve seen it can be brittle (e.g. if a small sample is provided, per this single case), would it be sensible to add a disclaimer to the post? It’s a great ad for the tool (& I’d love for a perfect tool to exist!), so it’ll sell subscriptions & we wanna make sure that some teacher out there doesn’t falsely accuse a kid, or engineer doesn’t think worse of their colleague unfairly, etc. False negatives are mentioned, but the false positive is what could hurt people. To human writing. Thank you!

ahepp 28d ago

>I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this Maybe I'm taking the "all" too literally here, but I read the article, and I'm not seeing anywhere the author ran a substantial portion of his corpus through Pangram to determine the false positive rate. That would be really interesting to see. He does * give an example of a piece of his writing that was, when ran in segments, flagged as generated (which he disputes) * multiply the size of his corpus by pangram's published false positive rate and estimate that a few of his pieces would be flagged * get the pangram model to label a piece "100% AI" when it only has 3 generated sentences * demonstrate the ability to intentionally trigger a false positive

scruple 27d ago

I just typed 233 words into Pangram, I'm trying to synthesize an idea from Aristotle to an experience I am having at work. It's not an original thought, specifically, but the application to this thing at work does appear to be novel. I'm still trying to work out my thoughts. Anyway it concluded that it's 100% AI. Even with a couple of random typos and missing grammar that I added. Smells like horse shit to me. I also don't like the idea that I have to shove a corpus of text into this thing to get it to process that it's incorrect. That expectation is wrong headed and places the burden on the wrong entity.