Pangram is an AI startup with 24 employees, headquartered above a Popeyes in Brooklyn. It has raised $13 million to date—about 0.0072 percent of what OpenAI has—and was virtually unknown until earlier this year. But if Pangram is to be believed, it’s the one force standing in the way of a full machine takeover of the written word.

Pangram promises to detect how much AI was involved in the generation of any given text, and it does so as a best-guess percentage (using AI, of course). In January, speculation swirled on Reddit and YouTube that the author Mia Ballard may have used AI to write Shy Girl, a self-published novel picked up for traditional publication by Hachette. Although Ballard denied it, Pangram’s CEO posted on X that the book was 78 percent AI-generated. Hachette later canceled the release.

A barrage of similar accusations followed. The New York Times was called out for running an AI-generated installment of its Modern Love column. Pangram score: 100 percent. Then came a winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (100 percent), the novel Daggermouth (60 percent), and a thriller titled Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body that had sold for $2.4 million (97 percent). In late July, Substack announced it was integrating Pangram into its platform so readers could quickly determine possible AI use.

Not all writers see this as a good thing. “There is such distaste and anger at the AI detection software,” says Jane Friedman, an author and publishing expert. “There’s this feeling like they are just as evil, if not more evil, than the AI companies themselves.” Outside of publishing and higher education, Pangram isn’t a household name, but I suspect it’s about to be; the demand to distinguish LLM churn from human writing grows with each passing day. The question to ask now is: How much can the company be trusted?

Max S...