AI Slop Detector Excels at Text, Struggles With Images

Computers can now write stories and draw pictures that look like a person made them.

Sometimes these robot-made things fill the internet with low-quality posts called 'slop.'

A new tool called Pangram works like a detective that sniffs out robot writing.

You paste in some words, and it tells you how much was probably written by a person or by a computer.

A reporter tested Pangram for a week with lots of tricky examples, and it almost never made a mistake with text.

The tool learns each robot's special style of choosing words, kind of like recognizing a friend's handwriting.

But Pangram is not very good at spotting robot-made pictures — in tests, it and another tool called Hive Detect missed several fake photos, including some showing famous people.

Some companies hide tiny 'watermarks' in robot-made images to help detectors, and one company, Anthropic, plans to do the same for writing.

Experts say the safest thing is to get your news from trusted places and remember that a lot of what you see online might not be real.