The Inquisition’s Here and It’s Here to Stay!

Matteo Wong: While Pangram is accumulating the power to end reputations and careers, the tool does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood. In turn, AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt. …Pangram, to be clear, is not useless. But this is exactly the problem: It’s too easy to twist and contest Pangram’s conclusions, especially when nobody really agrees on which uses of AI are or aren’t ethical. Just like chatbots, AI-detection tools have become effective enough for widespread use, but not reliable enough to fully trust. In this way, Pangram and other detectors are mirror images of the AI products they are hunting for. I admire Wong’s attempt to bring facts and perspective to a moral panic, but I fear it’s largely beside the point. The mob does not primarily want accuracy. It wants authorization. I’ve already seen several articles and posts which indicate to me that the narrative has congealed around Pangram being the authority that…