Max Spero Is One of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI

AI-generated writing possesses identifiable patterns, and Pangram Labs claims to be able to detect these patterns with a high degree of accuracy. According to internal tests, their AI-powered models can determine with over 99.5% precision whether a piece of writing is entirely human-created or AI-generated. Furthermore, the company's tools can differentiate between human- and AI-written segments within a single text, estimating the extent of AI involvement.

Max Spero, co-founder and CEO of Pangram Labs, explains that most AI-generated writing originates from a limited number of model families, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, making detection feasible. "Ultimately, what we’re doing is an authorship detection problem," Spero states.

Pangram Labs was on the brink of shutting down in late 2023 when the company experienced a surge in popularity during the fall of the same year. The rise of AI-generated content on various platforms led to a $9 million fundraising round by July of this year. In addition to their AI writing detection tool, Pangram Labs has developed a tool for detecting AI-generated images and has partnered with Substack to integrate their technology into the blogging platform.

There are AI text detectors that also offer "humanizers," which are tools designed to modify AI-generated writing to make it less detectable. However, Spero is firm against releasing such a tool. He emphasizes that Pangram Labs' ultimate goal is for every layer of online communication to utilize their technology to verify authorship. This function, he believes, will have a much larger market in the era of AI slop and AI impersonation.

Tracing the extent to which ideas themselves are influenced by AI poses a more profound challenge. Frontier AI models are continually improving, while some individuals may be writing in a manner increasingly similar to AI. Nevertheless, Spero is confident that Pangram Labs' technology is discouraging people from passing off AI-generated writing as their own. "The LLMs aren't static," he notes, "but neither is Pangram."