PANGRAM
Meet the internet’s new ‘Slop Janitor’
Your newsfeed just got a (very) well-paid cleanup crew.
Pangram, the internet’s self-proclaimed “Slop Janitor,” raised $9 million to clean up our digital streets. The New York-based startup has been refining its featured product, Pangram 4: a text detector designed to spot AI-generated and AI-assisted writing. They also have a new tool in the works that will flag bot-made photo and video content.
There are plenty of other players in this space, like Originality.AI and GPTZero. But with a reported 99.99% success rate, Pangram is looking to sweep the competition.
The short version:
Pangram 4 gets granular, aiming to identify hybrid writing that blends human and AI-generated text.
The platform is now expanding into images, and plans to add a video detector next.
They’re partnering with major institutions, including universities, publishing houses, Quora, and Substack to flag AI-written content.
The limits of cleanup
Lets take a look at Dead Internet Theory. Because what started as a conspiracy might have just become a reality.
The gist of this theory is that when the worldwide web is overrun with AI-generated content and bots, the internet — as we know it — will die. And just this past June, humans became the minority on the internet.
Which begs the question, can a startup like Pangram save us from this impending doom?
It can certainly act as a strong filter, distinguishing human-created content from slop. But the hope that AI detection platforms can revive the internet on its own, seems like a bit of a stretch. Even with these tools, the surplus of slop is overwhelming our feeds.
Pangram might be the best janitor, cleaning and flagging every last scrap of bot debris. But to save attention-economy (that we’ve all come to know and tolerate) we’ll need more than a cleanup crew. We need a bouncer at the door.
Okay, but can it make the em-dash cool again? PLEASE, I’m begging! - TL