Pangram is the company behind the most prominent AI text detector tool out there. For that company to release a study looking at how much AI-generated content there is on social media is a little like Charmin releasing a study revealing an epidemic of skid marks. But hear them out anyway. Their findings are both eye-popping and plausible. Pangram’s marquee finding is that 41% of longform LinkedIn posts are “flagged as fully AI-generated,” as is 30% of short form content on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is reportedly much more AI-saturated than any other social media platform, unless you consider Medium a social media platform, in which case I regret to inform you that 31% of the longform content you’re engaging with is fully AI generated. On X, Pangram says 29% of longform content is AI generated—but who is reading those awful longform X posts anyway? Pangram notes that longform X posts are arguably more AI saturated than LinkedIn posts if you count human-AI hybrid content. It claims that “only 53.2% of X articles [get flagged] as fully human-authored,” so keep that in mind if you’re actually thinking of reading one of those. Meanwhile, only 9% of normal X posts are fully AI generated.
On Reddit, 13% of longform writing is fully AI generated, compared to 3% for short form. On Substack, according to Pangram, only 10% of longform content is AI, and for some weird reason the percentage of shortform AI content is higher at 12%.
