For someone who’s expecting a defamation lawsuit any day now, Max Spero is remarkably calm.
“I’m sure it’ll be incredibly well-covered when it does happen,” he told me last week over nonalcoholic beers (his idea; he doesn’t drink) at a Brooklyn brewery called Farm.One. “And I do say ‘when.’ ”
Spero, 30, is the co-founder and CEO of Pangram Labs, an AI-powered tool that can detect if text has been written by AI with over 99 percent accuracy. So far this year, it’s halted the U.S. release of a highly anticipated horror novel from Hachette, struck one novel from France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt long list, and spawned countless accusations of literary fakery.
While some of the accused writers issued mea culpas, most of them doubled down. Meanwhile, critics dismissed Pangram as “snake oil” and “prejudiced” against black writers and non-native English speakers. The Wall Street Journal criticized Pangram in April as a “defamation machine” while The Atlantic later proclaimed in a headline “America Has a Pangram Problem,” arguing that “AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.” At the center of it all is Spero, who has received “many” threats of lawsuits—none of which have materialized, and all of which, he says, were written by AI.