Detection Tool Claims That the Pope’s AI Warnings Were Created by AI

On Monday, a newly created Reddit account surfaced on the popular forum r/AmItheAsshole, a place where users seek judgment from strangers on personal issues. This user inquired whether they had overstepped by “refusing to babysit my stepmother’s kids because I have my own job and responsibilities.” The post was clear, concise, and grammatically sound, detailing a scenario where the person’s stepmother and father frequently expected them to provide childcare with little notice, resulting in an argument.

“Now there’s tension at home, and I’m starting to wonder if I handled it incorrectly,” the redditor ended. “I know that raising kids can be stressful, but I also feel I shouldn’t be obligated to take on that responsibility when it’s not my role.” Responses to this user were mostly supportive: many noted that the kids were not theirs to care for, and suggested that moving out would be the best choice.

However, AI detection software created by Pangram Labs—which claims to have a 99.98 percent accuracy rate and a mere one in 10,000 false positive rate—identified the original story of family conflict as AI-generated.

I saw it marked as AI content while browsing the page thanks to the new version of Pangram’s Chrome extension, launching to the public this week; at the $20 per month paid tier, the tool analyzes posts on social platforms like Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Medium, and Substack in real-time, categorizing them as human-written, AI-generated, or AI-assisted. The evaluation also provides a confidence level from Pangram: low, medium, or high.

Researchers have discovered AI-generated content proliferating online. It threatens the integrity of journalism and social networks alike. Text partially produced by AI constitutes over a third of all new websites as of 2025, as per a recent study from Stanford University, Imperial College of London, and the Internet Archive. (The researchers employed earlier Pangram tools to reach their conclusions.)

It’s this clutter that Max Spero, CEO of Pangram and a self-described “slop janitor,” aims to help eliminate. He informs WIRED that incorporating instant analysis into the company’s browser extension provides users an easier means to check for AI content across the websites they regularly visit.

“By offering proactive checks, it becomes significantly more useful for individuals who want to avoid seeing slop,” Spero explains. “Copying and pasting text into an external tool is a major hurdle. People simply won’t do it.”

Naturally, fabricated scenarios are not unusual in subreddits like r/AmItheAsshole, where trolls occasionally post engagement bait featuring outrageously absurd tales. Yet even a discerning reader may not suspect a relatively ordinary narrative like the one above could be fabricated. (The redditor who initiated the post did not respond to a request for clarification on whether they utilized AI or what they intended to achieve with the contribution, which they later removed.)

While no AI detection system is infallible, Pangram’s is considered the most reliable and accurate among third-party researchers at various universities; a 2025 University of Chicago study evaluating AI detection tools awarded Pangram its highest rating and observed that its false positive rate is nearly nonexistent, particularly on longer texts. Spero notes that one factor contributing to its superior performance is that it’s trained partly on “more challenging examples that lie closer to the dividing line between AI and human.” I was unable to cause it to generate a false positive when testing it on articles published in WIRED.