As our interview progresses, Spero’s responses seem sticky, stopping and starting, and not just because he’s eating. I ask about his hiring ethos. Spero murmurs “hmm” before turning away without apology to microwave his food. Fifteen long seconds pass in silence. He finally faces me again and says, “The average person is at Pangram because they care about the mission.”
To detect AI, Pangram uses a method called “synthetic mirroring” by which it takes human writing and has LLMs generate a close match. This teaches its model how AI writes. Pangram also uses “hard negative mining,” searching datasets for false positives that it can synthetically mirror and use to augment its training set—using mistakes to retrain the machine. “All of our datasets are properly licensed, which I think is kind of rare in the AI world today,” Spero says, though that’s partly because Pangram’s product is far less data-hungry than ChatGPT or Claude. “I don’t want to completely throw the AI companies under the bus,” he adds, “but I think they’ve lost a lot of trust, especially in the world of creatives.” Today, Pangram caters to several industries, including education, the legal field, and recruitment, but creative writing constitutes the largest segment of the training text.
The Shy Girl story put Pangram on the map. Spero had already been calling out suspected AI writing from his social accounts, so it wasn’t a surprise when, in January, he was tagged in a Reddit post and subsequently sent a PDF of Ballard’s manuscript. “I put it in [Pangram], I posted it, and then later The New York Times asked me for comment,” he says. “I think people overstate the importance of Pangram in the Shy Girl story.” Except that wasn’t exactly how it happened. Like a game of AI-scandal telephone, it was a Pangram account executive who discussed the story with a publishing industry analyst who, in turn, brought it to the Times.
Another twist: Critics of Pangram, including the investigative project The Drey Dossier, pointed out that Spero’s copy of the manuscript came from a pirating website. When I ask Spero about this, he says, “Yeah. And, like, yeah … it is what it is. I hadn’t looked too closely. I didn’t go read the whole PDF. I just put it straight into Pangram.”
Pangram hasn’t exactly shied away from controversy since then. After the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner returned a high Pangram score, the company analyzed every winner since 2012, calling out three more potential AI uses. Still, Spero downplays Pangram’s impact, particularly on axed book deals. “Basically, with every book deal, to my knowledge, it hasn’t really been about the Pangram score,” he says. “That is a part of it, but if you talk to anyone involved, it is only a small, small part of the bigger picture.”
We move on to Pangram’s Substack integration. “People shouldn’t be afraid about disclosing this because your work should stand on its own as quality and something that people want to read, regardless of … ” Spero trails off. “Well, how do I want to put that?” He pauses. “I think I … oh, I know what I said the other day.” He gains confidence and his voice speeds up. “If the value of your work is dependent on deceiving the end user into thinking it wasn’t written by AI, then”—he hesitates again—“that’s going to be a problem.” (Later, I realize his intonation changed because he was quoting his own post on X.)