Testing Text Detectors With Pre-Internet Books
cephaloform · x · 2026-07-17
- This retweet discusses how, when evaluating text detectors like Pangram, you can't just test them on public texts from before the ChatGPT era, or the results will be contaminated by the fact that "the model has seen the training data."
- To verify it isn't just memorizing old text, someone found old books that don't exist on the internet, scanned them, and ran tests totaling nearly 3 million words.
- In the results, the detector still found a few traces of AI: 3 sections suspected of AI assistance, and 1 section suspected of AI generation.
- The key takeaway isn't the conclusion itself, but the rigorous anti-"data leakage" evaluation approach it provides.
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