Pangram Dreams of a Slop-Free Future

Max Spero—a cofounder of Pangram, an AI detection tool popular among journalists—asks, “If you’re not going to bother writing your newsletter, why should I read it?”

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—Philip K. Dick’s dystopian 1968 novel, later adapted into the movie Blade Runner—a bounty hunter is tasked with killing cyborgs who look deceptively similar to humans. A polygraph-like device can distinguish between the two. Max Spero, the thirty-year-old cofounder and CEO of Pangram, an AI detection tool, likens his company to that machine. “In a sense,” he told me, “we’re detecting whether something is an android or a human.”