When is detecting AI-generated text worthwhile?

This is Jessica. AI-text detectors are coming to play a bigger role in adjudicating what texts are worthy of our attention. There was the surprising case of an apparently AI-generated short story winning the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize, which returns 100% AI generated by Pangram, the leading detector whose false positive rate is reported as roughly 1 in 10,000 in its own audits and near zero on medium-to-long passages in an external audit. Applying Pangram to the other 4 stories that won awards this year suggests two others were heavily AI-assisted. More recently, the NeurIPS Position Paper track announced that it was desk rejecting 18% of submitted papers that were detected by Pangram as fully AI-generated. Another 13% are getting followed up on with the authors to investigate AI use. We’re having to reconsider what authorship means. Can a person create literature or express their position on a subject without writing a single sentence themselves? When do we really care…