This isn't the first high profile case of a black person being reported with accusations of using AI this year[^1][^2]. Once or twice, sure, whatever. But a third time now? It's hard to think this isn't anything but targeted, especially given this particular case the group making the "claims" are entirely anonymous.
Is it that, or is it because marketing "content" by a minority author with an "interesting life story" is an industry not an art, and they're less likely to care how the "content" was produced?
How many non black people have been accused though?
Why would they target these specific 3 black authors? I assume there are hundreds/thousands of successful black authors, 3 "this year" seems very small to call it a targeted attack
It's hard to think this isn't anything but targeted
By whom?
A simpler (and easy to think of) explanation is normal systemic racism. Black writers are likely underrepresented in the training data begin with, so the models assume Black writing can't be real.
Pangram is making the "claims", not some group. It is known to have a very low false positive rate, especially on long texts.
And there is now also evidence of plagiarism, rather than just AI writing, in his other work (see down thread).
I remain convinced the whole notion of AI-detection algorithms with any semblance of precision and accuracy is a con.
Critics say the author almost exclusively relied on AI to create his work, based on Pangram’s findings.
Pangram says it “is trained specifically to detect the latest AI models from frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, xAI, and more. [They] benchmark against 26 models (so far)…”.
I can probably list more than 26 models off the top of my head. Granted, some models have been distilled against others and will be “detectable” but that’s NOWHERE near a large enough sample size to be reliable in 2026.
You or I could get a flag by that detector in our first attempt, and it wouldn’t take long for a false positive against enough attempts of truly original thought either.
The only thing I’d actually believe is things like Claude’s text watermarking system. However, those systems will never be present for EVERY model, so reliable blanket detection remains an impossibility.
The entropy in written text of meaningful length is simply too great for detection to be reliably possible in 2026, especially considering the changes the author can make.
"Experimenting, I’ve also found that I can pretty reliably get Pangram to declare large sections of text to be AI-written or human-written depending on the larger textual context I place those sections in - that is, I can take AI-generated text and embed it in human-generated text and have Pangram declare it 100% human, and I can take human-generated text and embed it in AI-generated text and have Pangram declare it 100% AI. I’ve also found that it’s pretty easy to induce false positives, that is, to write texts myself that Pangram identifies as AI-written. All of this makes me hesitant about the Pangram tool, and in particular the way many people use it, as a one-shot gotcha machine."
Sounds like it may be very easy for someone motivated enough to find sections, even longer sections, that turn out as 100% AI written.
The impact from a model not being included in the training set is increased false negatives for text generated by that model, not increased false positives for text written by humans.
>He is also a finalist for the most prestigious annual French language awards, the Goncourt and the Renaudot, set to be issued soon.
If I had a book that was hoping to win this award, anonymous accusations like this seem like a pretty easy way to shift the odds. It's impossible for the author to disprove the allegations and the award committee will want to 'avoid controversy'
He's been revealed as a flagrant plagiarist [1] and there's a lot of evidence that his writing before 2023 had very low pangram scores, and the other authors nominated did not have high pangram scores.
An account that has only existed for 4 months, whose only source for whenever something is plagiarised is a single company whose bread and butter is telling everybody what they want to hear, where most of the tweets barely gets a hundred likes should not be getting the level of coverage it has right now.
I guess you can pick between that and the propaganda provided by the AI peddlers, they surely have nothing to gain telling everybody what they want to hear
Note 'Balance ton Claude' is an oblique reference to 'Balance ton porc', what's commonly considered the French equivalent of the US #MeToo cultural event
There's important extra context on this case in that the author has been discovered to be a flagrant plagiarist. He won an award in 2014 for a work which was almost entirely ripped from a French novel in the 60s.
My neighbours regularly remind me that AI is quite different in French - despite being Francophone they tend to use it in English for what they think are better results.
It's entirely plausible detection is totally different in different languages.
On how much text? There's a fair few reports that it's quite inaccurate when given smaller samples of text, and if you go cherry-picking the odds will likely go up even further.
The author behind the twitter account has been discovered [1] (source in french and behind paywall). It's team leaded by a french essayist and journalist at "Le Figaro" named Samuel Fitoussi.
Agreed. It’s not like a particular word is any different when it’s made by ai.
Would we care if someone used a typewriter vs a computer to write it.
This looks like a weird snobbishness. The fact that it’s by Europeans makes it more funny since they have been left out of the AI race.
In the end you have a final product. Can critique it on its own. He used ai to help write it and you couldn’t tell before, says more about the product and perhaps you don’t like what it says about you .
People like to admire the author, to see a better version of themselves in the author.... If they find out that image in their head is a lie, they get angy
This isn't the first high profile case of a black person being reported with accusations of using AI this year[^1][^2]. Once or twice, sure, whatever. But a third time now? It's hard to think this isn't anything but targeted, especially given this particular case the group making the "claims" are entirely anonymous.
Anyway, here's the thread from twitter if people are interested: https://x.com/Pangramed/status/2102383484027171306?s=20
[^1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/featu...
[^2]: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/jason-arday-re...
Is it that, or is it because marketing "content" by a minority author with an "interesting life story" is an industry not an art, and they're less likely to care how the "content" was produced?
How many non black people have been accused though?
Why would they target these specific 3 black authors? I assume there are hundreds/thousands of successful black authors, 3 "this year" seems very small to call it a targeted attack
Are the accusations untrue? The evidence that i have seen seems pretty compelling.
It's 2026. This defence is not working anymore.
It's hard to think this isn't anything but targeted
By whom?
A simpler (and easy to think of) explanation is normal systemic racism. Black writers are likely underrepresented in the training data begin with, so the models assume Black writing can't be real.
Maybe the AI companies used human feedback from Haiti people to train their models?
Pangram is making the "claims", not some group. It is known to have a very low false positive rate, especially on long texts. And there is now also evidence of plagiarism, rather than just AI writing, in his other work (see down thread).
What’s the false positive rate multiplied by number of books in print? This seems like a fraught use of odds / stakes.
Three black people in a year across the literal entire planet’s population and you are convinced it’s a racist conspiracy?
"He is black, you cannot accuse him of anything, you racist."
I remain convinced the whole notion of AI-detection algorithms with any semblance of precision and accuracy is a con.
Critics say the author almost exclusively relied on AI to create his work, based on Pangram’s findings.
Pangram says it “is trained specifically to detect the latest AI models from frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, xAI, and more. [They] benchmark against 26 models (so far)…”.
I can probably list more than 26 models off the top of my head. Granted, some models have been distilled against others and will be “detectable” but that’s NOWHERE near a large enough sample size to be reliable in 2026.
You or I could get a flag by that detector in our first attempt, and it wouldn’t take long for a false positive against enough attempts of truly original thought either.
The only thing I’d actually believe is things like Claude’s text watermarking system. However, those systems will never be present for EVERY model, so reliable blanket detection remains an impossibility.
The entropy in written text of meaningful length is simply too great for detection to be reliably possible in 2026, especially considering the changes the author can make.
best blog post I know about this: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...
"Experimenting, I’ve also found that I can pretty reliably get Pangram to declare large sections of text to be AI-written or human-written depending on the larger textual context I place those sections in - that is, I can take AI-generated text and embed it in human-generated text and have Pangram declare it 100% human, and I can take human-generated text and embed it in AI-generated text and have Pangram declare it 100% AI. I’ve also found that it’s pretty easy to induce false positives, that is, to write texts myself that Pangram identifies as AI-written. All of this makes me hesitant about the Pangram tool, and in particular the way many people use it, as a one-shot gotcha machine."
Sounds like it may be very easy for someone motivated enough to find sections, even longer sections, that turn out as 100% AI written.
The impact from a model not being included in the training set is increased false negatives for text generated by that model, not increased false positives for text written by humans.
> The entropy in written text of meaningful length is simply too great for detection to be reliably possible in 2026
Pangram is unreliable on short text, but much more reliable on long form text.
This story smells odd; why does anybody care about the accusations of an anonymous twitter account? A claim seemingly without evidence no less.
>He is also a finalist for the most prestigious annual French language awards, the Goncourt and the Renaudot, set to be issued soon.
If I had a book that was hoping to win this award, anonymous accusations like this seem like a pretty easy way to shift the odds. It's impossible for the author to disprove the allegations and the award committee will want to 'avoid controversy'
Well, he has been evicted from the Goncourt.
He's been revealed as a flagrant plagiarist [1] and there's a lot of evidence that his writing before 2023 had very low pangram scores, and the other authors nominated did not have high pangram scores.
[1] https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/litterature/2026-09-23/thelyson...
Because it's an anonymous twitter account dedicated to scanning and identifying AI usage in published works?
An account that has only existed for 4 months, whose only source for whenever something is plagiarised is a single company whose bread and butter is telling everybody what they want to hear, where most of the tweets barely gets a hundred likes should not be getting the level of coverage it has right now.
https://x.com/Pangramed
I guess you can pick between that and the propaganda provided by the AI peddlers, they surely have nothing to gain telling everybody what they want to hear
By all means test it out with some non-AI content and report back
Note 'Balance ton Claude' is an oblique reference to 'Balance ton porc', what's commonly considered the French equivalent of the US #MeToo cultural event
There's important extra context on this case in that the author has been discovered to be a flagrant plagiarist. He won an award in 2014 for a work which was almost entirely ripped from a French novel in the 60s.
https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/litterature/2026-09-23/thelyson...
Pangram 100% is notoriously difficult for humans to do, even with intent.
My neighbours regularly remind me that AI is quite different in French - despite being Francophone they tend to use it in English for what they think are better results.
It's entirely plausible detection is totally different in different languages.
On how much text? There's a fair few reports that it's quite inaccurate when given smaller samples of text, and if you go cherry-picking the odds will likely go up even further.
It's in the article - looks like they ran it on a book.
The author behind the twitter account has been discovered [1] (source in french and behind paywall). It's team leaded by a french essayist and journalist at "Le Figaro" named Samuel Fitoussi.
[1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/qui-se-cache-derriere-le-com...
I love learning about an alleged "uproar" in my own country from a BBC link shared on HN.
People are now also finding cases of plagiarism (not AI writing) in his past published articles. https://ca.rollingstone.com/culture/thelyson-orelien-author-...
> a writer with an exceptional life-story
Sounds familiar
What's the big deal? If the book is good, it is an excellent use of AI.
Agreed. It’s not like a particular word is any different when it’s made by ai.
Would we care if someone used a typewriter vs a computer to write it.
This looks like a weird snobbishness. The fact that it’s by Europeans makes it more funny since they have been left out of the AI race.
In the end you have a final product. Can critique it on its own. He used ai to help write it and you couldn’t tell before, says more about the product and perhaps you don’t like what it says about you .
Tell us so we can make informed decisions?
"Why do you care is there is horse meat in your beef burger patties if it tastes good" vibe
What's wrong with horse meat?
For the few pages I saw on X it's actually tiresome to read.
Lots of short sentences. Lots of weird metaphors. Many infamous "it's not x, it's y".
Like it or not, people expect significant AI-use to be disclosed. When only human is credited, they feel cheated.
Excellent use of AI? Disclose it and avoid the fuss.
The writing is pretty terrible and shlocky but the topic is what the committee is looking for.
Feel free to read it then.
I agree.
I don't like the unnecessary defensiveness by the author to pangram proof.
Perhaps the same reason people get upset when a gold medalist is discovered using enhancers. The goal isn't just to publish a great story.
Us non pod-people feel betrayed when we’ve been lied to.
People like to admire the author, to see a better version of themselves in the author.... If they find out that image in their head is a lie, they get angy