Comment by paulpauper
6 hours ago
It is interesting how despite huge and rapid advances in coding or math, AI still sucks at writing and is (mostly) obvious, at least if people are trying to pay attention. it cannot fool pangram, even though it's not clear exactly what it flags as being AI. Maybe one day AI will close the gap.
I think in coding and math you have a formal system to say what is good and what is bad, while with writing it's much more subjective and thus harder to optimise. Also I believe many of AI advancement in 2026 are linked more to the agents than to models and agents benefit a lot from having environment with clear reward functions
I've had some similar thoughts, I find it super fascinating how easy it is for most people to identify AI writing.
In the past two decades of CG etc. untold numbers of words have been spilt on the subject of the Uncanny Valley and you always get this explanation of how the brain has dedicated pattern matching circuitry and can easily flag when faces feel "off".
How interesting that the same is true for language. Turns out we're not just visual-heavy animals, but also very symbolic ones.
i don't see the value in AI closing that gap any more than i see the value in AI closing the gap on talking to my friends for me, or closing the gap on watching a movie for me, or closing the gap on taking a walk on the beach for me, etc, etc, etc; the document is the artifact of having written but the artifact is not the value
I think Pangram literally just vacuums AI slop into its training data to refine how AI writing is detected. More of it is becoming available by the day, and they have some default eval prompts they used if the methodologies in their paper are still used, so I presume doing this isn't that hard.
AI absolutely has a detectable style once you read enough of it.