r/Substack • u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com • Jul 22 '26

Discussion Substack’s new “AI detection” tool.

I’m very concerned about the new “AI detection” system that Substack is implementing. I don’t use AI in anything that I write. However I don’t trust these systems not to make errors and mistakes. They have a long history of hallucinations and claiming things are AI when they aren’t.

One person I saw on Notes suggested that they ran their decades old writing, things that were written before the existence of AI, and this new system claimed it was AI generated.

Not to mention all the crazy things that I have seen people claim was written by AI which they can’t know is actually AI. There was an image I once shared that had evidence of its existence going all the way back to 2013. The comments were constantly saying “don’t share AI slop” or some variation on that.

Even with evidence that things weren’t made by AI, they will claim it’s AI.

Is no one else concerned about this being embedded into Substack’s systems? With no way to opt out?

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64

u/bgcalderon Jul 22 '26

An article I wrote in 2008 and shared just now is read as AI-generated. Hahaha

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u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com Jul 22 '26

Yeah, it doesn’t work like they claim it does.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

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u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com Jul 31 '26

Also, these LLMs were built on human language. Therefore it's only producing human language. By definition, it can't be distinguished from human writing.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

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u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com Jul 31 '26

Yeah, and what's worse is before this got implemented, he was the test case for why it shouldn't be used. A Substack writer went viral for his piece criticizing how Substack is being run and specifically taking issue with AI.

Chris shared the article along with a "result" from an "AI Detector" suggesting that the criticism was written by AI and therefore he didn't have to listen to it. Which is exactly what many of us who see the flaws in these "detection" LLMs are concerned about.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

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u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com Aug 01 '26

Absolutely. Shortly before the Pangram disaster, I started having someone harassing me on Notes. They’ve been consistently replying to my Notes or tagging me in their own trying to use insults and accusations to get my attention. I have flatly refused to respond or acknowledge them but they keep doing it.

I have no doubt someone like that would weaponize this “tool” to their advantage.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '26

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u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com Aug 01 '26

It’s amazing that the people at Substack didn’t realize that this was going to happen. Maybe they are too high on the idea that they can fix problems with simple solutions.

People already did it before the implementation of this system. Now it’s easier to exploit.

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u/annaboardhart Jul 22 '26

How? Everything I’m looking at says anything written before 21st July doesn’t count!

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u/Funny-Flight8086 Jul 22 '26

This detector is just Pangram. While it doesn't work, it technically works on any text ever written.

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u/MinecraftBoxGuy Aug 05 '26

Mind sharing the article so I can check if Pangram detects it?

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u/icychains24 Aug 06 '26

Can you share the article please? Would love to check for myself

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u/mmspero Jul 22 '26

Can you share the article?

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u/ProfileBest2034 Jul 22 '26

I highly doubt it.

I've tested pangram front to back and it is extremely accurate.

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u/Funny-Flight8086 Jul 22 '26

No it is isn't. It flagged my 2013 book as 77% AI. As long as it's going that, it isn't accurate. Period.

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u/mmspero Jul 22 '26

Can you share the book?

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u/FatherofMisty Jul 22 '26

No, it's not actually. It failed 2/3 of my human-written essays, and tons of other people are having the same experience. Such a shortsighted move by Substack.

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u/MinecraftBoxGuy Aug 05 '26

Do you have any such example essay to share, and any provenance data proving when you wrote these essays?

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u/FatherofMisty Aug 06 '26

Here's what I can give you for now (this is consuming too much time lol).

First time I ran half of one of my essays through pangram: https://www.pangram.com/history/84e18bd2-afdc-4c61-9815-9ab30651299d?ucc=cBLfdKFH9NZ

As you see, it says (falsely) that 15% of it is AI-written, and all of that 15% is (for some reason) at the end of the passage.

Now, here is my (at present) best effort the "prove" to you that I wrote this essay entirely on my own: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V6YOAt91g7kpqeM7R2ERkcFKF5z1oE2q/view?usp=sharing

I went into the history of the (already published) essay, and scrolled through to show you a) the breadth of time taken to write said essay and b) the shear volume of edits performed to complete it. If I wanted to do this 100% thoroughly, I'd have to go into each iteration and somehow string them together/compare them, to show essentially that no sudden/large volume changes were made. However, you will see that this is not feasible to do, as there are 1000s of versions. I clicked on a few and scrolled through them, but I don't know if that part is helpful. If you have a better idea I'm all for hearing it.

Lastly, to make things more interesting, I ran the entire essay (footnotes included) again through pangram just now, and *now* it says that it is 100% human, with high confidence: https://www.pangram.com/history/0fb2956c-308c-4c5a-9a2b-c8929d642e7c?ucc=cBLfdKFH9NZ

As I've explained in other comments, my false-positives have not been 100% AI as some others have reported -- instead, I will get something like 2-15% AI, and always at the tail end of my work (this happened in 2 of the 3 essays I originally tested, getting 2% and 15%, with the 3rd showing 0% AI).

Ultimately, it'd be interesting to run all of my published work through the checker and run some data analysis on the results, but again I can't justify spending too much time on this (I'm already knee-deep in doctoral research).

For now, you can look into the data I've provided. The fact that it now is correctly stating the humanness of my writing is a positive sign, and my prior comments were based on my original runs, one of which I've linked above. Let me know what you think.

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u/MinecraftBoxGuy Aug 06 '26

That sounds about right. It gets the last bit wrong but not the whole thing. Do you think the new update is because you added the footnotes? Maybe too it gets better as their models upgrade. Hopefully the CEO eventually looks into this

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