No, Check Norris is neither a typo, nor a cheap dad joke. It is a name for a tool, and the story behind it is pretty funny: a story of warm evenings among the alleys of a city in the depths of the mediterranean, way too much fun time, and the wish for making the difference. Here’s a story of a really really bad naming for a really really good tool.

Check Norris doesn’t check. Check Norris just knows.

Brainstorming with the Ludwig team is a truly unique experience. Leave behind your expectations of post-its, pens, gamified processes, or even a table. The creative spirit flows free, bodies on the floor, couches, chairs, and stairs.

During Ludwig’s last team-building week (Ludweek! We're really into puns), many things had to be sorted, for example naming new tools and understanding how to show our value, our ten-years experience in the field, and basically how to sell a product whose worth is undeniable, at least as much as the whole toolkit Ludwig has been building through a decade.

It all happened very quickly:

"What do you call an AI checker that is so good at knocking off competitors in the blink of an eye? What do you call “the Chuck Norris of AI detectors?”

And the copywriter, sadly enough, came out with:

"Check Norris!"

At first, an embarrassed general laugh that cooled the room in a second, then the CEO actually thought about it, not sure whether that naming was genius or just an ugly dad-joke.

We haven’t called it Check Norris (yet,) but the idea of Ludwig dressed like Walker Texas Ranger is still making us giggle now and then. If you don’t know who Chuck Norris is, it means that you are really young (first off,) and second, don't worry, I have you covered. Chuck Norris, interpreted here in this AI-generated image of Ludwig Wittengstein with his cowboy hat and sheriff badge, is an American actor that became famous in the early 90s for interpreting Walker Texas Ranger, the sheriff so powerful that could defeat anybody. A type of inside jokes that sprouted from this character was that Chuck Norris was so strong and powerful that he doesn’t get tired from taking a run, it’s the run that gets tired after taking Chuck Norris, and so on and so forth with millions of jokes like this:

Chuck Norris doesn’t get flu, it’s the flu that gets Chuck Norris
When God swears, he swears to Chuck Norris

Etc. etc.

It was fun, it was relatable and also largely recogniseable by Ludwig’s target audience. In fact, although we haven’t talked about naming the tool this way for now, we had to make a post about it!

Hector Detector

The doubt that still haunts our consciousnesses is: what would have happened if we would have called our platform “Hector”, instead of Ludwig? I guess we’ll never know the answer to this question, but surely the founders are still very in love with the naming Hector, so much that they tried to name thus almost every tool they launched since 2016.

And what tool could be more perfect to be called Hector than an AI detector? None, for sure. It embraced the funny soul of Ludwig, and also it would have been quite easy and fun to communicate it through social media.

Unfortunately for all, the name Hector Detector and its powerful memetic aura was dumped as quick as it came. We decided to keep it easier and name it “AI detector”, and focus more on the development of the tool rather than on the silly name to put on the landing page.

Ludwig is a researcher at heart–its founders are all PhDs and a Postdoc–so no wonder that Research and Development is always the main topic and on top of the list of priorities. Also, it is impossible to stay fresh in the AI market if you don’t invest serious time on R&D. There’s this tool, in particular, that we are so proud of and that we haven’t been sure on how to call it for a while now.

The tool we had to name this time is something we deeply care for, both for its relationship with our core values, and for the effort and energy we put into it. It is an AI detector, a solid and strong tool that reads your texts and understands whether it is written by a machine or a human person. It gives you a score from 0% to 100% “machine-generated text” with an astonishingly high reliability (99.6%).

Ludwig was born with a search engine for English sentences, and then it became a comprehensive tool for any writing need (quick fixes, translations, rewriting, editing of long texts.) How come that now it features an AI detector? As I said before: our core values tell us to guarantee an English aid kit that is democratic, accessible for all. According to us, an English enhancement platform must allow all to share their good ideas at best, despite all the barriers, and since Ludwig is a leader in the field of computational linguistics, fighting linguistic barriers since day one, we began to challenge another barrier: the AI detection.

Universities, educational institutions, and other intellectual authorities are raising walls against AI-written texts, and we saw in this attitude a huge miscalculation and a short-sighted reaction towards non-native speakers that need facilitations to be able to express themselves and their valuable concepts.

To democratise language means to give everybody the same possibilities to show what they are capable of, permitting all to express themselves and their ideas, no matter what.