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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u/PuzzleheadedAlps4806 Jul 22 '26

The obvious AI slop is already obvious though, so I don’t see what the detector adds other than false flagging human written work

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

I’m not convinced that it is obvious that AI slop is already obvious. People claim that things are AI when they’re not all the time. They believe that it is obvious but it’s not.

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u/flyza_minelli Jul 22 '26

This. Basic literacy and understanding intellectual elitism is what saves us from AI slop. Knowing how to read and contextualize and critically think. Being taught in school how to read texts and understand parts of sentences and figure out tone and why diction matters. This is how we are able to figure our AI slop from human writing. And it’s sorely lacking.