Mystery! Blacks & Progressives Keep Getting Flagged As Using AI to Write? (Racism Only Explanation)

This episode examines claims that AI detectors like Pangram unfairly flag writing by African and Black authors as artificial. Analysis of publication data from the Pan African Review and individual authors (most entertainingly by Cremieux) reveals a sharp rise in AI-generated and AI-assisted content coinciding with the availability of large language models.

The discussion extends to similar patterns among other academics and journalists who publicly oppose AI while relying on it for their work. Examples include university administrators, book reviewers, and media figures facing scrutiny over undisclosed AI assistance. The conversation highlights tensions in elite institutions around transparency, performance expectations, and evolving tools for content creation.

Broader themes include differing responses to AI detection across communities and the challenges of maintaining integrity standards as AI adoption grows in professional writing.

Show Notes

Hat tip to Cremieux for Does African Writing Sound Like AI?

Black Academics Using AI And Lying About It

From Cremieux:

“If you read about Pangram, you’ll quickly see a bunch of people claiming that it doesn’t work. Worse, they’ll sometimes claim that it’s biased. Pangram allegedly discriminates against autistic authors, against anti-vaccine authors, against people I’d politely describe as ‘conspiracy theorists’ on both sides of the aisle, and, most prominently, against African writers. How? Well, it supposedly flags their work as AI!

There are a lot of articles about Pangram and other AI detectors ‘mistakenly’ flagging Black and African authors as using AI to do or assist with their writing. The most prominent piece that comes to mind for me was published in the Pan African Review. The piece was an unusual breakout for the Review: the journal generally enjoys a pretty limited circulation. I suspect this is because of the import of the topic area and the utility of providing an example to point to when people want to explain why they were ‘wrongly’ flagged as using AI for writing. So, I’ll consider the perspective of this piece to be emblematic of a community’s wider concerns given how much it resonated.

The piece is authored by one Timi Olagunju. Olagunju is “a lawyer and public policy expert working at the intersection of tech, governance, and development.” His claim is that writing in formal English will be flagged as AI-generated by AI text detector:

“Consider an international student in the United States. She has spent years being told that her English must be grammatically correct. She avoids slang, checks every verb and structures each paragraph carefully. Then a detector labels her work artificial because it is controlled and predictable. First, the institution tells her to master standard English through IELTS and TOEFL. Then it treats mastery as suspicious.”

This allegedly explains why “African (or black) writers” are liable to have their work flagged by AI detectors:

“For many African writers like Falade, English is both a language and an inheritance shaped by colonial history. In Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and other former British colonies, generations of students were taught forms of English influenced by British education. Teachers emphasized correctness, formal composition and structure.”

Is this the case? We can test this right away by inputting Olagunju’s own article into Pangram and… it receives a 100% AI score with high confidence. Surely he wouldn’t use AI to write, right? Let’s consider his thesis in good faith and perish the thought—for now. Surely the other writers in the Pan African Review wouldn’t use AI to write either, right?

To test the extent of AI adoption in the Pan African Review, I looked at how much Pangram flagged articles there over time. Unfortunately, the site is currently down, so I had to extract whatever articles I could from the Internet Archive.1 What we see right away is a total rejection of Olagunju’s thesis: articles were never flagged as AI-generated before the advent of LLMs, and the share flagged as AI-written has rapidly crept up afterwards. This is not what we expect if African writing generally is to be considered liable to be flagged as AI.

Another test of Olagunju’s thesis is to simply look at his writing. He wouldn’t lie about this stuff, would he? All of his past work before LLMs came out should return a 100% AI score with at least moderate confidence. Alas, quite literally none of it that I could find does. All of it shows up as human-written. It’s only after LLMs came out that his work started being flagged as AI-generated.

But maybe we’re at fault here. Maybe Pangram trained on the Pan African Review and Olagunju’s work and they flag pre-LLM work as AI-generated because it’s in the training set. To get at this question, I asked Pangram CEO Max Spero if that was the case: was “Pangram trained on the articles in the Pan African Review?” “It was not.”

Jason Arday

The first thing I thought about when it came to matters of “prominently black academics who center discussions of race” and potentia

* Academics Dave Harris and Martyn Hammersley raised concerns in 2023 about similarities between an Arday paper on minority students’ mental health and an earlier study by Anjum Memon and colleagues. Two journals subsequently published corrections addressing attribution or textual overlap.

* More importantly, some quotations presented as coming from Arday’s own interview participants closely resembled quotations from participants in Memon’s earlier study. Retr