Thread · HN Continuity

I remain convinced the whole notion of AI-detection algorithms with any semblance of precision and accuracy is a con.

Critics say the author almost exclusively relied on AI to create his work, based on Pangram’s findings.

Pangram says it “is trained specifically to detect the latest AI models from frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, xAI, and more. [They] benchmark against 26 models (so far)…”.

I can probably list more than 26 models off the top of my head. Granted, some models have been distilled against others and will be “detectable” but that’s NOWHERE near a large enough sample size to be reliable in 2026.

You or I could get a flag by that detector in our first attempt, and it wouldn’t take long for a false positive against enough attempts of truly original thought either.

The only thing I’d actually believe is things like Claude’s text watermarking system. However, those systems will never be present for EVERY model, so reliable blanket detection remains an impossibility.

The entropy in written text of meaningful length is simply too great for detection to be reliably possible in 2026, especially considering the changes the author can make.