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by danjc 34 days ago
A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful.

Browser vendors can't build this.

7 comments

> A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful.

I am strongly against this, because you cannot accurately detect it. People start to get blamed even more when they actually did not use the AI.

Nothing new under the sun unfortunately. It’s just an easy way to dismiss people you don’t want to listen to, and people abuse it like crazy.
This is virtually impossible to build. Not just because all current "AI detector" systems are fake or outright scams with accuracy comparable to a coin-flip on frontier model output, but because even if someone did build a reliable detector and released it to the public, it could be used for adversarial training and it would become worthless pretty fast.
Pangram is legit. I don't work at pangram, we integrated it in our paper website and one of the cool emergent behaviors I've seen is that on AI papers with example rollouts, it will accurately mark the paper's main text as human generated and the rollouts as AI generated.

My understanding is that they strongly believe in no false positives, so it's definitely possible to slip something by them but if it marks something as AI, it very likely is.

> My understanding is that they strongly believe in no false positives

Who cares what they "believe" (or, more accurately, say they believe). What are the underlying processes that actually guarantee this, and what data supports it?

What is a rollout in this context?
> Pangram is legit.

Their 99.98% accuracy claim[1] makes me doubt that.

[1]: https://www.pangram.com/solutions/chrome-extension

Rather obviously they're choosing the one that makes them look best. Another they link to¹ shows 98% for example.

Much more importantly, 9/10 dentists agree it's the best.

1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654, linked from² https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals (the second section)

2: the third study they link there is based entirely around the assumption that Pangram is correct, and seems to have been a collaboration or something as they're included in the credits area.

AI is very hard to detect and changes on a weekly basis.

But you could build something that ranks the quality of the webpage content! This would also be more useful.

Of course, that tool would have to use AI...

Bot detectors are broken. Even human bot detectors are broken. When I'm in the right mood, I can be quite capable of writing with very good formatting, structure, and phrasing. When I actually take the time to do this, there seems to be about a 70% chance that some nimrod will crawl out of the woodwork just to accuse me of being a bot.

Even humans who deliberately use lazy formatting and leave obvious errors uncorrected to provide "proof" of being human aren't seeing the big picture, here.

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That bigger picture is that it's easy to make instruct a bot to be lazy, or to avoid the usual quirks. I hate when I'm working on a project and see a constant outflow of negation ("Don't do x, y, or w" is a recent hit) and unfounded exclusive confidence ("The correct answer" as if this is Highlander and there can be only one). Repetitious jargon like overuse of "gate" for things other than fences and skiing is something I can't stand. Plus the usual things — like overuse of unusual punctuation — that are obvious tells.

That stuff all drives me nuts.

But the bot just follows instructions, and my bot has been instructed to avoid those things. It generally performs very well, though the instructions do need re-hashed every now and then as models ebb and flow.

It's super easy to get the bot to write some python or perl that takes a body of text and intentionally some words or lose a comma while mmaking other errors and converting — into --.

When it comes to human error in written language, we just aren't that hard to emulate.

Now, that all said: You'll just have to take my word for it, but I do not use the bot to help with writing English. But I do have every confidence that if I woke up tomorrow and actually started bulking up my comments using a bot, none of you would be able to tell.

Everyone has failed to build this. They can only sell claims that they have built it to fools.
I work somewhere that tries to do such detection (for fraud prevention) and it sort of feels impossible to me in the medium term. AI slop qualities are fleeting - I’ve seen Reddit AI posts that have misspelled words, no dashes, stilted sayings and so on.

People want their slop to be undetectable.

Check out Pangram