This Is How to Tell if Writing Was Made by AI
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When you consider the fact that many people don't know how and where to place a comma, it's safe to say that AI is already better than most people at writing. It's clean copy. It can be surprisingly persuasive. And sometimes, it's even informative. But there's frequently still something about it that just seems... off. Many people can tell quite quickly when they're reading AI-generated text. And beyond the style, the existence of AI generated text has all kinds of ramifications, from making it easier for students to cheat, to the rise of deceptive chatbots, to potentially degrading the experience on sites like Reddit. So how do you actually tell if a piece of writing was generated by AI? On this episode, we speak with Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram Labs, a company that built software to detect whether a piece of content was AI generated or not. We talk about the advanced techniques they use, the risk of false positives and false negatives, and what AI writing means in general for the future of the Internet.
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Transcript
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| 1:02.8 | Podcasts, Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lods podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. |
| 1:20.9 | And I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 1:22.2 | So Tracy, you know, you ever come across some writing? You can't articulate exactly why, but you're like, I'm |
| 1:29.3 | pretty sure AI wrote this. Does this happen too much? So full disclosure, I haven't really |
| 1:34.8 | thought about it that much. Yeah, because the thing is, I probably should think about it more, |
| 1:39.5 | but there's a lot of bad writing out there. And I've become sort of inert to it. And I also think that, |
| 1:45.7 | I don't know, trying to figure out whether or not something was generated by AI nowadays, |
| 1:51.6 | if you actually dedicate a lot of your own time to doing that, that is a huge mental burden to be attempting. |
| 1:58.8 | Especially, you and I are in the journalism industry. How many of the |
| 2:01.8 | pitches do you think that we get from PRs right now are being generated by AI? Imagine if you're |
| 2:07.2 | reading each one of those and trying to figure it out on a daily basis. You know what I suppose I |
... |
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