A leading AI detection company is shifting its marketing strategy away from anti-AI callouts.
Over the past year, Pangram has developed a reputation as a leading AI detector within the tech and media space. The company’s software was at the center of controversies like the March scandal over the purportedly AI-written horror novel “Shy Girl” and last month’s debate over accusations that the award-winning short story “The Serpent in the Grove” was written using AI.
Although Pangram’s involvement in controversies over AI authorship has raised the company’s profile, Pangram is actively shifting its marketing strategy away from this type of headline-grabbing approach, believing it will bring diminishing returns as consumers grow more accustomed to AI-generated content.
“Personally, I think this is a phase that the world is going through, and I actually don’t expect for people to continue to be so scandalized at AI in different places,” said Pangram chief executive officer Max Spero in an interview with GamesBeat. “If the same sequence of events happens next year, it’s just going to be less press and less attention than this year.”
Pangram’s move away from AI-authorship debates signals a deliberate shift in strategy for the AI detection company. Earlier this year, Pangram hired the journalist and digital marketing consultant Rod Breslau to help advise its marketing strategy, in part by connecting the company with prominent voices in the digital creator space — but also by helping raise the alarm about large digital creators using AI to write their content.
Breslau’s contract with Pangram ended earlier this year, but while he was working with the company in a consulting capacity, he used its software to detect AI-generated content on social media — and call it out to his hundreds of thousands of followers on X. Spero sometimes commented underneath Breslau’s call-out posts, more explicitly drawing a connection between Pangram and the ongoing debates over AI.
“Everyone proclaims to be a leader in their niche, and they build their entire personal brand around that on Twitter and LinkedIn, — you have executives, tech CEOs,” Breslau said in an interview with GamesBeat. “”If you’re one of these people, you should have to write your own posts. And if you don’t write your own social media posts, then I, or everyone else, should make fun of you.”
Spero said that although Pangram’s work with Breslau had been effective in driving attention to the company, Pangram had decided to move in a different direction because its previous call-out-based marketing strategy was specifically attuned to the current moment — in which consumers are being presented with a wealth of AI-generated content for the first time — and not for long-term growth. Instead, the company plans to frame its marketing around users’ personal experience, focusing on improving the health of their digital feed rather than on shaming users of generated AI, per Spero.
“The direction that I think is going to be the most successful for the business is not saying, ‘hey, we can prevent these scandals,’” Spero said.
Marketing approach notwithstanding, consumers’ growing awareness of and attention around AI detection apps like Pangram’s reflects a natural rise in trust-manufacturing technologies as consumer trust of digital content is disrupted by artificial intelligence, according to Lasse Clausen, a founding partner at the investment firm 1kx, which invests in emerging technology categories like trust infrastructure, who said that the demand for such services are growing on a societal level.
“The value of proving a real person did a real thing, or that a piece of content is authentic, rises in direct proportion to how cheaply both can now be faked,” Clausen said in a written interview with GamesBeat.