Schools Struggle With AI Detection Tool That Makes Mistakes

A computer program called Pangram is being used by schools and publishers to find writing created by artificial intelligence. The tool has become very popular because it can usually tell if a robot wrote something instead of a human. But Pangram makes mistakes sometimes, and this is causing big problems for students and writers.

Pangram works by reading lots of text and deciding if it was written by a person or by AI like ChatGPT. Schools use it to check student papers for cheating. Publishers use it to make sure books are really written by humans. The tool has been used to check famous newspapers, award-winning stories, and even a message from the Pope.

The company that makes Pangram says it only makes mistakes about one time out of every 10,000 tries. Max Spero is the boss of the company that created Pangram. He says they are very careful before they say something is written by AI. Scientists have tested Pangram and found that it works pretty well most of the time.

But there are still problems with the tool. Sometimes Pangram says human writing was made by AI. Other times it misses AI writing and thinks a human wrote it. This happens because AI writing keeps getting better at sounding like humans.