AI-assisted writing is text a person wrote partly with help from an AI tool — for example, editing or rewriting parts. This sits between fully human and fully AI-generated.
Co-authorship is a spectrum
As AI adoption increases, more and more people are co-authoring text with AI. Similarly, many users of AI detectors want to know to what degree AI was involved in producing the text. Did somebody use AI to smooth their own words, or did they ask AI to generate a full essay from scratch?
Pangram breaks AI assistance into two levels:
Light AI assistance Light AI assistance typically indicates surface-level changes that do not affect the underlying ideas, structure, or content of the text. Light assistance includes spelling and grammar fixes, updated phrasing, translation, and readability changes.
Moderate AI assistance Moderate AI assistance typically indicates changes where AI may have rewritten significant portions of the text or added content of its own. Moderate assistance includes changes such as adding additional details or clarifications, making tone adjustments, restructuring text, or rewriting the text in a different style or tone.
How does it work?
In short, we train our model on a wide variety of co-authored text by prompting AI models to make edits of various degrees to text that was originally human-written. For a technical deep dive, feel free to dig into our technical blog post describing the science behind the model.
Pangram also breaks longer documents into segments and classifies each one within the context of the longer document. That means that if the first half of a document is human-written and the second half is AI-assisted, Pangram will be able to tell you that.
Co-authorship is a spectrum
While fully human-generated and fully AI-generated text are concrete categories with clear definitions, a large amount of text produced today doesn't fall into either category. What is the exact threshold between "light" and "medium" AI assistance? How much input can a human give an LLM in a prompt before the human's influence on the output is greater than the AI?
Ultimately, we attempt to answer these questions by matching Pangram's outputs as closely as possible to our own interpretations of each category, but we understand that co-authorship is a spectrum and defining the exact line between these categories is more of an art than a science.
