This Is How to Tell if Writing Was Made by AI

April 2, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Pangram Labs founder and CEO Max Spiro joins Odd Lots hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway to explain how his company's tool detects AI-generated text. Amid rising AI use in writing—from journalism pitches to SEO content—Spiro details the mechanics of reliable detection, its error rates, and risks like "AI slop" flooding online information channels.

The Need for AI Text Detection

AI writing excels at grammar, punctuation, and clarity, often surpassing average human output, but it severs the old heuristic linking polished prose to human effort or intelligence. Spiro argues this enables bad actors to flood platforms with low-effort content that mimics legitimacy, eroding signal-to-noise ratios online. Teachers, lawyers, journalists, and publishers face practical stakes: verifying student essays, legal briefs, or pitches without endless manual scrutiny. While humans achieve about 90% accuracy spotting AI text intuitively, Spiro built Pangram to exceed this systematically, tracking intent-unclear "slop" without judging light tools like spellcheck.

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What you'll learn

1 (01:06) **Hosts' AI Writing Intuitions** - Tracy and Joe debate gut feelings about AI text, noting its clarity but "sickly sweetness" and poor style imitation
2 (04:29) **Pangram Labs Intro** - Hosts introduce free/paid tool that accurately flags AI vs human text, even after obfuscation like multi-language translations
3 (06:39) **Guest Max Spiro Introduction** - Founder/CEO of Pangram Labs joins to explain detection tech
4 (06:43) **Human Detection Baseline** - Max achieved 90% accuracy spotting AI by intuition, proving problem is tractable for AI models
5 (07:23) **Why Detect AI Slop** - AI floods info channels with low-effort content, severing grammar/intelligence link
6 (09:18) **Model Accuracy Metrics** - False positives ~1/10,000 on human text; false negatives ~1% on straight AI outputs
7 (10:41) **Core Detection Mechanism** - Learns thousands of micro-decisions in phrasing, word choice, syntax patterns unique to LLMs

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

When you consider the fact that many people don't know how and where to place a comma, it's safe to say that AI is already better than most people at writing. It's clean copy. It can be surprisingly persuasive. And sometimes, it's even informative. But there's frequently still something about it that just seems... off. Many people can tell quite quickly when they're reading AI-generated text. And beyond the style, the existence of AI generated text has all kinds of ramifications, from making it easier for students to cheat, to the rise of deceptive chatbots, to potentially degrading the experience on sites like Reddit. So how do you actually tell if a piece of writing was generated by AI? On this episode, we speak with Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram Labs, a company that built software to detect whether a piece of content was AI generated or not. We talk about the advanced techniques they use, the risk of false positives and false negatives, and what AI writing means in general for the future of the Internet.

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