We're ‘dangerously close’ to dead internet theory according to Pangram's CEO

0:00The Equity Team: This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

0:06Pangram's CEO: Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Balan, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Everyone has heard of the dead internet theory, where we all just stop engaging online because it's so filled with bots and AI slop. But what if it doesn't have to be that way? A handful of startups have cropped up in the last couple of years to detect AI-generated writing and keep the internet human. But the prevalence of AI content doesn't just affect your social media feeds, it can result in all kinds of fraud, from job applications to customer reviews to insurance claims.

0:42Pangram's CEO: Pangram is one company that has gotten a lot of attention lately for its role in trying to build the trust layer of the internet. So today we're talking to Pangram's co-founder and CEO Max Spiro about the promise of AI detection tools and where to draw the line between AI-assisted and AI-generated.

1:03Pangram's CEO: Max, welcome to the show.

1:04The Equity Team: Hey, thanks for having me, Rebecca.

1:06Pangram's CEO: Yeah, really excited to talk to you again. So give us a little bit of the background of Pangram, which has been kind of blowing up as the new AI detection tool that a lot of people are using. This started two years ago. Give me a little bit of your backstory.

1:21The Equity Team: Yeah, so we started the company, man, almost three years ago now. Oh, really? Just as a really interesting problem that we wanted to solve as machine learning researchers. We saw AI getting better. ChatGPT and GPT-4 had come out. We thought we could try to tackle this problem, which seemed largely unsolved at the time. And I think since then, we've made a ton of progress. We went from something that's kind of binary of like, is there AI? Yes or no? to really more like mixed, trying to understand like, what is the degree of AI assistance versus human input?

1:58Pangram's CEO: So, you know, you've talked about this being a trust layer on the internet, etc. So why do we need a trust layer? What are you seeing that is causing? I mean, it sounds like an obvious question, but what are you seeing that's causing a need for your kind of a business?

2:12The Equity Team: Well, AI just sort of enables people to produce large volumes of text that seem plausible. And I I think this actually sort of creates issues with a lot of societal structures. For example, like if you look at something like job applications where people write cover letters, maybe short answers. Typically, like if somebody's on a job hunt, they could apply to maybe a couple dozen jobs in a day. Now you could use an AI auto-applier to apply to a thousand jobs in a day. And so this creates this just like massive imbalance of effort where it's infinitely easy to produce content or take actions. And then the verifier or reviewer on the other side ends up being kind of swamped.

3:00The Equity Team: But I think there's still a lot of fear that like any AI system looking at resumes could be biased.

3:06Pangram's CEO: You know, from a user standpoint, right, we're seeing AI slop take over the Internet. it's in our feeds it's in you know academic papers it's in you know politicians when they're presenting you know new legislation and i think it's a as users we don't want to see that right as people who are like existing and cohabitating space on the internet you're just like oh this is like a low effort slop that i don't really want to see but like aside from that where is the like who's losing money off of this? Like who's finding, you know, their businesses are being affected by AI slop. I think like there is this issue

3:47The Equity Team: with like the social platforms where like AI slop is a good thing because it makes all the numbers go up. You know, it's engaging. People are posting more, people are liking more. But then I think we're also seeing this like longer term effects where people churn from platforms that have too much AI slop. You know, people like in the short term, but then in the long term, they're less engaged. And they're like, I don't want to just see all this slop.

4:15Pangram's CEO: I'm curious if you've seen anything about like, you know, reviews. I make a lot of decisions for where I might eat or what clothes I might buy or what have you based on reviews. I'm wondering if any of your customers are platforms that host reviews so that they can, you know, ensure that they're not just posting a bunch of fake bots, which has been a problem for a while. Yeah, I've definitely seen a lot of this on basically every review platform, like anything from like Yelp reviews where somebody wants to get Yelp Elite that requires like a high volume of reviews.

4:46The Equity Team: I'm almost certain that they're taking action on this now and trying to make sure that people don't get Yelp Elite just by posting AI reviews. But we also see it on Amazon just because there's such a really strong incentive to have a high volume of reviews and high quality, helpful reviews. So I often see, I feel like every time I'm on Amazon, I scroll into the reviews, I see at least one AI generated review on the front page, which is shocking to me.

5:13Pangram's CEO: Yeah, it's interesting. And then, you know, of course, all of these companies are doing their own AI generated synthesis of all the other reviews. And they're telling you kind of what reviewers say, which I guess isn't slop. We know what it is, but I don't like it.

5:28The Equity Team: Yeah, but when AI is just synthesizing other AI's reviews, like what are we even doing?

5:32Pangram's CEO: Now, tell me, how is it trained? Let's take a step back. Like, how can you tell the difference between AI generated versus AI assisted? And what are you using as training data?

5:44The Equity Team: So we have a corpus of licensed human examples. So these are writing examples from the pre-2022 before ChatGPT came out. And then what we're doing is, say, an example like a essay on Moby Dick. Then I'm going to ask ChatGPT to also write an essay on Moby Dick. And then Pangram will compare the two and learn the stylistic differences in everything from like the word choices, all the choices that a human would make differently than AI. And then we do this on sort of like a large scale. So basically the total training set is 50 % human text and 50 % AI text. We also have some different kinds of prompts because we want to take, when we decided to take Panagram from being binary to understanding AI assistance, we added a bunch of AI assistance prompts into our training set.

6:40So now we'll look at, say, an essay, and then we could say, make it more detailed or improve it or polish my writing.

6:48The Equity Team: And on this scale, we're also able to understand the degree of difference, like from the human text to the AI polished text. How much did it change? And then we're able to teach our model to estimate the degree of change by just looking at the final product.

7:07Pangram's CEO: Do you have any like findings as to what it's actually looking for? Or is it kind of still just a black box? Right. I mean, we all see the, you know, Amanda, one of our reporters wrote a funny article. It's not just one thing. It's another thing. And it cracked me up because we had like traded, you know, that version of AI slop between Slack messages for a while, just being kind of silly. Mostly she was she was doing great at it. I kind of sucked. But I'm like what, you know, I think The Economist recently had a piece that looked at the punctuation. It's the repetition. But like, is there any are there any patterns that you're able to pull out?

7:43The Equity Team: I think the patterns that I look at are different than the ones that the Panger model looks at. So for me, it's really like these like fluffy adjectives and metaphors that don't really make sense. And the sentence structure is like it's not just X, but Y. But I think what the Pangram model is looking at is it's looking at a bunch of weak signals. For any given word choice, it might say, like, AI prefers this word choice. Humans sometimes choose this word choice. But if you take this over the course of 50, 100, 200 words, if you're looking at every single word choice is what AI would prefer to say, that I think we can build up confidence over time through a bunch of weak signals to say that we're actually very confident that this is AI generated.

8:28Pangram's CEO: So you're not using like watermarking, right? It's not that.

8:33The Equity Team: Watermarking has its limitations. For example, like a watermark can tell you whether a text was touched by Claude. So it can say like, if you take your text, ask Claude to polish it, then the watermark, it may show up, but the Claude watermark can't tell you was this a light polish versus was this fully AI generated? Whereas I think Pangram is much better at that and much more granular.

8:58Pangram's CEO: What are you seeing in terms of conversation about what people will accept from AI generated versus AI assisted? Like, you know, there's a lot of Substack creators, and we can talk about your deal with Substack in a minute, but there's a lot of creators who, you know, maybe don't have an editor and they might put their work through Claude or ChatGPT to polish it up or check it for grammar or, I mean, like Grammarly, I guess, is a version of this, right? So what are you seeing in terms of like what people will accept and not call slop and just be like, well, I guess this is just like a tool that people can use.

9:32The Equity Team: I think we're seeing a really wide range. Like, I think we haven't really settled on any given norm. There's some people who are like, oh, the ideas are my own. And then I put in bullet points and had Claude write me a whole sub stack letter. And I think they're, they get tens of thousands of readers. Like this is like a legitimate use case that people are okay with. But on the other side, I think if somebody is writing like very like personal prose or like something like that, I think there's a lot less tolerance for Claude coming in and then like making it just sound like it's AI generated. And then I would say like nobody really has issues with like using AI to fix your grammar or do small edits.

10:15The Equity Team: But I think oftentimes people will underdisclose the amount of AI use. Like if I put my blog post into blog and say, make it better, like it will change 50 plus percent of the words sometimes, which I think is just erasing my own voice.

10:30Pangram's CEO: Yeah, that is definitely a problem. Like if you want, as a writer, if you want to develop a voice, you can't, you can't just ask the chat bot to make it better for you because it will take away your voice.

10:41The Equity Team: Yeah. And it has its own voice, which is very distinctive. Like people read it. It's like, I know that writer that sounds like Claude.

10:47Pangram's CEO: Right. Or it's chat, right?

10:49The Equity Team: Exactly. Or it sounds like chat.

10:51Pangram's CEO: Okay. So talking about content creators, you raised 9 million recently. You also partnered with Substack. And so Substack's new tool will tell you who's been writing their newsletters with AI. So readers can scan any post, a note, or apply a comment that's over 100 characters. And to see a human versus AI estimate, you know, we talked about how people on social media, they want to know what they're interacting with. I know you've also got the Chrome extension, which kind of gives you a little bot next to people's names as you scroll through like your LinkedIn to, you know, if they might have used AI to write their posts.

11:28Pangram's CEO: What other kinds of platforms do you see using this tool down the road? I mean, Substack makes a lot of sense, but are you working with other similar types of platforms?

11:37The Equity Team: I think to be determined on which platforms we'll work with.

11:41Pangram's CEO: You don't want to break the news right here, right now?

11:43The Equity Team: As much as I would love to. We'll see. But the Chrome extension allows us to bring Pangram to platforms whether they want us there or not. Which is, I think, really great because not everyone is going to have the same aversion to AI Slop, especially if it's improving their own metrics on their website. So I think the main thing that I'm really excited about is bringing the Pangram image detection to the Chrome extension as well. We can bring this to Reddit, to Pinterest.

12:14Pangram's CEO: Yeah, I do want to talk about the image detection model because that's new. But before we get into that, I want to ask you about this kind of witch hunt component, right? Um, so like the Atlantic wrote in May, America has a pan gram problem. A wall street journal author called it a defamation machine. Uh, people have been using it to accuse others of using AI to write and it's not always perfect, right? You have a really good success score and I use it a lot of the time. I'll just throw shit in there just to, just to see, I'll like mess around with it. And just every once in a while, I check on your product to see how it's working.

12:48Pangram's CEO: Sometimes it's perfect. Sometimes it's not. How are you dealing with that when we're in this world where people just want to point the finger?

12:56The Equity Team: So Pangram has a 1 in 10 ,000 false positive rate. That means text that was fully human written will get flagged as AI about 1 in 10 ,000 times, which is very much not zero. That means at the scale we're running Pangram, we're going to have a few dozen false positives a day. So I think that's something really important.

13:14Pangram's CEO: It's got to be more than that. Anecdotally, I've kind of noticed it a little bit more. And sometimes it changes. Sometimes I'll put a whole piece of text in and it'll say human written. And then maybe I'll put a paragraph and it'll say AI assisted or AI written. And I'm like, interesting. How did that change? You know, and why is it false? Right. So it's tricky because it's such a needed tool, but you don't want to go around falsely accusing people like students trying to, you know, submit papers and what have you.

13:42The Equity Team: Yeah, no, I mean, I think it is like something we're working to manage. The goal of Pangram is to help enable positive and meaningful discourse about this. But I do think it would also be an issue if it was taboo to call someone out for slopping it up and posting AI content as their own. Because I think that's part of what's happening right now. People are willing to call out AI content because they feel like there's just so much AI slop that's being shoved in their faces through all channels. and like we're in this really critical period of setting norms where we need to be able to say like hey don't post complete ai slop under your own name like that's not cool yeah i want to pivot

14:26Pangram's CEO: back to the photo detection because this is something that was released what like last month i believe we covered it and talk to me a little bit about that why now uh what's cool about it

14:35The Equity Team: yeah so why now it's because ai images have gotten really good kind of scarily fast i think we went from AI images being obvious. You just count the fingers, you look at the text and make sure it's not garbled. And today it's like GPT image can produce a really like photorealistic image that I cannot tell whether it's AI or not. Grok can do this too. Midjourney still produces like these really striking images, which you have some like AI sense of them, but they're all good No. Well, good meaning like realistic. Is it good that we have a bunch of images that we can't tell if they're AI or not floating around the internet?

15:17The Equity Team: Maybe not so much. So I think that is where Pangram can help as well to help flag if something is AI generated before misinformation goes really viral. Yeah.

15:28Pangram's CEO: Okay. So this is available on the Chrome extension as well. Obviously, from a social platform standpoint, I want to know if what I'm seeing is AI generated or not. But are there any other interesting use cases that are very urgent or emerging aside from kind of deep fakes?

15:44The Equity Team: I mean, I think we've just seen an increase in fraud that's enabled by AI. So anything from like, submitting a fraudulent expense and having AI like produce a receipt for you to like, you know, like having AI put a bug in your food and then sending it to DoorDash to get a refund. Like, I think all of these things are like, really possible with AI and we don't really have any defenses against them right now.

16:10Pangram's CEO: Yeah. And or like marketplaces catching, you know, fake listings or dating apps. I would imagine them having this as like some kind of layer in between. So you have like public partnerships like with Substack, but are you also like kind of white labeling the product and being this, you know, internal layer that, you know, maybe the end user wouldn't see?

16:28The Equity Team: That's the plan for us. We'll see. We work with a couple of social platforms on this. So Quora still uses Pangram. Yeah, they have questions and answers and they don't want somebody to just use AI to answer all the questions because you have a chatbot for that. people are looking for like real human connection and anecdotes.

16:46Pangram's CEO: Again, with like AI assisted versus AI generated, where do you draw the line, right? Like what is like if it's a real image versus an AI modified image, right? If someone's essentially using AI to do what Photoshop would have done or, you know, cut someone out of a photo or what have you, like, are you able to tell that kind of thing?

17:04The Equity Team: Depends. I think like if you're using AI to literally crop the photo, then like, no, we can't tell. But if you're using AI to like, regenerate the photo in a way that like one person is now missing, like, yes, we can tell that. And I also think like, there's a lot of good reasons to be able to tell this, like, it's kind of reality distorting if you can just change a picture of what happened in the past. And so I think it's really important for us to be able to say, like, no, this is not an actual accurate representation of the past, of reality. Every company today is looking for an edge. Better insights, faster decisions, greater resilience.

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18:03Pangram's CEO: Yeah, but I mean, the flip side of that is there's a liability question. if you do false positives on a photo of like a war crime or a police shooting or an insurance claim, right? Like, you know, is that something you're thinking about, about being liable if you say something is AI generated when it wasn't and maybe it was a necessary photo that was taken to hold power to account?

18:23The Equity Team: Sure. Yeah. I mean, in some sense, like this is why like multiple accounts are very helpful. Pangram image false positive rate is about one in a thousand. So maybe it'll happen where we have 10 pictures of a war crime and one of them Pangram says it's is maybe AI generated but nine of them it's confident are real then I think we still like have a good sense that like this was real if there was only one picture and Pangram says it's AI generated then I think there's reason to be skeptical and I think starting with this healthy skepticism because Pangram says it's AI is like a really great place to be it's it's a better starting point than like being skeptical of every single image because we have no idea what's AI or not.

19:06Pangram's CEO: Right. Yeah. And I am currently skeptical of every single image. Okay. So, so you guys are standing out in the space, right? I mean, you've had the Atlantic writing about you, you've have profile sub stack deal, but you're not the only ones here. There's competition in the space, including Winston AI, originality AI, copy leaks, GPT zero. One thing about GPT zero, they were recently acquired by Superhuman. And I'm kind of curious how you look at the long-term, you know, business value of Pangram. Like, is this, will this always be a standalone product? Or does this become part of, you know, someone's stack, right?

19:41Pangram's CEO: Can you imagine this being infrastructure and seeing that as like an exit strategy for the company?

19:46The Equity Team: I'm not really thinking too much about exit strategy, but I do see the long-term vision of Pangram is it's not really just a tool that people use to paste things in and get an answer. But we're really looking to be more like core infrastructure for the internet. I think as the internet is more and more agents and bots and AI generated content, it's going to be increasingly important to find what was human and prioritize it. So we're going to be working with platforms. We're going to be building out this Chrome extension to help people navigate an internet full of AI content. And the goal is to be deeply embedded and help kind of like solve this problem that AI has created out of nothing.

20:27Pangram's CEO: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you're trying to save the dead internet theory or save us from the dead internet theory.

20:33The Equity Team: Exactly. I think we're actually dangerously close. If we do nothing, like dead internet theory will happen within the next few years.

20:42Pangram's CEO: What happens if we have a dead internet? Maybe we'll just go like touch some grass, you know?

20:46The Equity Team: Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be a lot more walled gardens. It's going to be like closed group chats. And like, in a sense, the anonymous internet that's been free and open is has been dying for a while. Like most of the internet is now under real names and real faces, which I think is a big change compared to 15 years ago. Yeah.

21:07Pangram's CEO: How do you future-proof? Because AI will only continue to get better. They have better resources to stay ahead, to sound more natural. And again, also people might become more tolerant of AI-generated or AI-assisted content over time. So yeah, how do you future-proof? What's your moat exactly?

21:23The Equity Team: I think for us, it's really about, again, it's like understanding the degree of AI content. If somebody co-wrote something with ChatGPT and they think it's really good and they put a lot of time and effort into it, then maybe that's great and we should be celebrating that there's a lot of effort put into this, even though there's also some degree of AI assistance. Whereas if you see a Twitter profile and the last 30 replies are all AI generated and they're all like a minute apart, then I think we know with very high certainty that this is like an entirely automated account. And that's really, I think, what we need to be solving for in the long run.

22:01The Equity Team: Like while Payroom is really good at telling you the degree of AI assistance today, it's not because any AI assistance is bad. It's because it's really important to tell the difference between some AI assistance and fully AI generated.

22:16Pangram's CEO: Do you think that, you know, in the future, you know, one of my first gigs was copywriting. I would just write website copy, SEO focused website copy. And I think all of those jobs have just completely disappeared. Right. I wrote blogs for companies, stuff like that, which a lot of it is kind of nonsense anyway. But, you know, this was the name of the game. Do you think that we're going to place a premium on human content in the future? Like, well, a lot of these jobs that, you know, got demolished, maybe they'll start coming back as brands have, you know, they might suffer from a poor association with having just like nothing but slop.

22:47The Equity Team: I think definitely, yeah. I think slop and AI content in general is associated with low-quality, low-effort outputs. We're hiring writers. We're working with writers directly. Everything that we put out is human-written. Anthropic is still hiring writers. OpenAI is still hiring writers. I think it's very clear that there is still a need for this role. People aren't just outsourcing it to AI at the highest levels. But I do think that the premium we're putting on this means that the lowest level copywriting and people churning out SEO blogs, that was kind of human slop already before AI was a thing.

23:29The Equity Team: So I think these are the ones that are going to be automated and probably these jobs are just going to be gone.

23:36Pangram's CEO: Yeah, yeah. Slop has existed for a long time. And I think the thing about slop is that it's not just that, it's the volume, right? It's not just like that you might be used AI for it. It's like when it comes out in such a low quality volume, that's when you want to call it slot.

23:51The Equity Team: Yeah, I think that's a really good point of like when volume and quantity matters over quality, then AI is just going to do a better job. AI can produce more quantity at a higher volume cheaper than a human could. But when quality is what matters, I think that's where we're still prioritizing the human touch and the human voice.

24:09Pangram's CEO: Okay, great. Well, hey, that's a great place to end it. Where can our listeners connect with you and find your work online?

24:15The Equity Team: You can find me on Twitter at max underscore Spiro underscore. You can find us at pangram.com.

24:22Pangram's CEO: Okay, great. Well, thanks again for joining us on the show. To our listeners, you can find me on Twitter and on LinkedIn. You can find Equity on Twitter and Threads. Talk to you next time. Equity is hosted by TechCrunch Senior Reporters and produced by Teresa Locansolo with editing by Cal. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com slash events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.