New Delhi: People on social media have long complained about the platforms being overrun with AI bots. Now, a study by Pangram confirms this suspicion. The report found that one in four long-form posts on social media was flagged as completely AI-generated.
Pangram’s Chrome extension lets users scan social media posts for AI-generated content. Through an opt-in setting in the extension, users anonymously shared scan statistics with the company. Pangram compiled the first few months of this data into a report, published on 9 July.
LinkedIn was found to be the most AI-saturated platform, where more than 40 per cent of long-form posts were flagged as fully AI-generated. While LinkedIn posts made up a third of all the scanned posts, the app accounted for nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) of all content flagged for AI.
The app hardly discourages people from using AI on its platform. Its ‘Write with AI’ button has now been rebranded to ‘enhance post’, but it still offers AI writing assistance.
Since the Pangram extension’s launch on 24 April, it has created a dataset of over 10 lakh posts across platforms including LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, X, and Reddit. Only posts longer than 50 words are considered, and each one is counted only once.
The posts were analysed with Pangram 3.3, the company’s latest AI detection model, which it claims achieves a 0.01 per cent false positive rate.
AI yet to conquer Substack, Reddit
Mixing AI-generated and AI-assisted content resulted in X as the worst offender. Almost half of all articles on X were either fully AI-generated (23.9 per cent) or AI-assisted (22.9 per cent).
“An internet that is completely flooded with undisclosed AI content is bleak, but we don’t believe it’s inevitable. We hope that by providing transparency to AI-generated content online, we can give internet users back some control of how they spend their attention,” read the report.
Reddit had the highest scan volume of any platform. Its posts made up 36.7 per cent of all items scanned, but it had one of the lowest combined AI shares of any platform, at 4.4 per cent.
On Substack, 78.3 per cent of the posts were found to be human-written, and only 10 per cent were AI-generated.
“Contrary to what one might expect, people are overwhelmingly willing to use AI to speak on their behalf in professional settings that are associated with their real identity, and less likely to use it on casual and anonymous platforms,” the report said.
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