alt Hacker NewsIf you switch on the 'Supporting Evidence' on that site, it seems to be basing it's opinion on three things:
- Use a descriptive triad of "reviewing, directing, and course" (it incorrectly misunderstood 'course correcting'). That's not common in writing but humans do do it occasionally.
- Using the word 'thoughtful'. I don't understand that as evidence of AI.
- Using the words 'Book Apart' together, which would be a clear AI signal if it wasn't the name of a publisher of short books, and being used in that context in the article.
I don't think you should put much stock in the output of pangram.com.
Replies
johnfn • today at 5:26 AM
Pangram clearly says "Remember, our results aren’t based on this evidence." when you turn on supporting evidence.
Pangram's "Supporting Evidence" feature is misleading and you should ignore it. It's entirely separate from the classifier that determines whether text is AI; it just takes text that's already been classified as AI and looks for some hardcoded AI tells in it. I kind of wish they'd get rid of it, but nontechnical users really like it.
The classifier itself has a very low rate of false positives: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BFI_WP_2...