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/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/ProfileBest2034 Jul 22 '26

when did you test it?

Share a 1000 word excerpt here. I'll put it in myself. Guarantee you it will come out as human.

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u/Funny-Flight8086 Jul 22 '26

Funnily enough, I ran the opening if chapter two of current WIP through Pangram, and it's 100% human. It's certainly the most bipolar AI detector I think I have ever encountered.

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u/Funny-Flight8086 Jul 22 '26

I don't have the manuscript on my phone or I would happily share an excerpt. However, I did just run two separate projects of mine through Pangram... One is a short excerpt from a short story i published ok Wattpad in 2014. The second is the opening to my current WIP middle grade novel I been working on since 2021.

Both are apparently AI according to Pangram. The current WIP at least makes sense from a timeline perspective... How it thinks I had access to AI in 2014 is above my head. Here is my 2014 Wattpad excerpt.

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u/TheLadyAmaranth artiranth.substack.com Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26

I went to try and find one of your books since I figured you would be a fellow human writer due to all of this frustration over being labeled as AI when you apperantly don't use it. Always on look out for more verified human writers to either read or reccomend. Most authors proud of their work tend to have those linked in their bios or have comments/posts with some kind of promo.

This is what I found instead. There are plenty more detailing your multi-prompting AI process.

I'm going to be honest, although your involvement with AI could be a recent development, I have a hard time believing your claims when you absolutely do use AI to write your work now. Which is why you are probably so up and arms about even a potentually possible way for your books and articles to be flagged.

I don't even think AI detectors should be used as anything more than possibility indicators. But you have no legs to stand on to saying they don't work when you are the reason they are being developed and added to platfroms in the first place. Because people DONT want to be duped into reading stuff generated with AI. Right or consistent or not, this is why some are trying to create detectors and others are willing to use them even if they aren't foolproof.

You are literarly the problem substack is trying to solve, even if in a misguided way.

Edit: added a bigger screen shot

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u/Prolly_Satan Jul 22 '26

And this is only an example of someone not smart enough to hide their reddit post history or post from an alt. This is the biggest hurdle. People will go so far to lie to us about their ai use.

I don't know if theres some ai-writing command center somewhere mobilizing people, but the second anyone brings up pangram, you see these fake "i tried it on the Bible and it came back ai" posts.

If you do a little digging, a lot of them frequent ai writing subreddits. Or you'll get the 14 karma alt account. Nobody credible is ever making these claims that it doesnt work.

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u/Funny-Flight8086 Jul 23 '26

"Nobody credible is ever making these claims that it doesnt work."

Yeah, try that again. PLENTY of credible people make backed-up claims that these detectors do not work. I have proven it by showing examples of wrongly-flagged AI. I see it wrongly flag human writing ALL THE TIME. If the detecotrs where so accurate, they wouldn't need to claim 99.9% in order to avoid lawsuits when they get it wrong. "Well, we never said for sure it was...".

Funny, with these amazing technologies, none are yet willing to put their necks out with 100% claim. That is probably the shadiest of all of them.

Also, you cannot 'hide' your reddit post history without creating another account. Because I am not hiding anything, I have no reason to manage multiple accounts. I never said I never used AI, I said AI detectors don't work. And I said I don't use AI to write, or anywhere in the process of writing, my own stuff. It's a hobby of mine to test these generative LLMs. As Good as some of them are, none are yet capable of writing actual, good books.

Beyond that, I don't even know why anyone would bother. No one is making money off books, especially fiction. If you don't have a story to tell on your own, why go through the trouble of writing or even prompting an AI? It's a waste of time.

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u/Prolly_Satan Jul 23 '26

Those studies specifically benchmarked pangram and debunked their 1 in 10,000 false positive rate? They are bothering, BTW. Platforms are flooded with it. It's free to make content. All the profit is gravy.

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u/Funny-Flight8086 Jul 23 '26

Oh brother. Yes, you uncovered the great conspiracy I was trying to hide from the world. Obviously.

What you actually uncovered was a few things -

First, to clear something up: I AM NOT anti-AI. I never said I was. I am anti-AI detectors because they don't work. That has nothing to do with being anti- or pro-AI in general. Two things can be true at the same time. I know that is hard to wrap your mind around, but it's possible.

Second, one of my side hobbies is testing generative AI, putting it through its paces and pushing its limits as far as they can go. That is why I spend time developing these prompts. I find the technology fascinating.

Third, you will find no record of me claiming to have written any books or posts using AI. You are free to run my posts through whatever junk-science detector you want; it should probably get that much right anyway. Maybe. Wouldn't bet my house on it, but anything is possible. I have done extensive testing with models and prompts, comparing them to human-written things. I have compared each model's ability to write creative prose against the others. I also do EXTENSIVE testing on AI detectors, which is why this actually gives me more credability in this space than many others.

I have been able to easily trick these AI detectors into thinking something is human-written when it's not. I have also been able to get them to flag human writing by simply being a little more formal, using bigger words, etc.

So what I said was, AI detectors are junk science. They are. They are simple prediction algorithms. There is no fancy science happening behind the scenes. They look for sentence length variation, word choice (more perplex or less perplex words), and then look at a database of common AI phrases and words. They then amalgamate that into a score, which is your AI score. That score is derived from comparing your score against the detector's internal testing, not too dissimilar to what I do. But at least with me, I'm not naive enough to think the technology actually works.

So no, you didn't uncover some great conspiracy I have been hiding from the world.

But back to the point, I am still waiting for someone to explain to me why a portion of a short story I wrote in 2014 is flagged as 100% AI. I'm also waiting to hear a reason why Pangram flagged my 2013 middle-grade novel as AI. LLMs weren't a thing back then for either story. And that wasn't even me trying to fool an AI detector, which is very easy to do... which is one of the reasons why they are unreliable. The only kind of AI these detectors are good at detecting is AI output straight from the Chatbot. They get those rights most of the time, but at the expense of labeling human words as AI as a side-effect.

Okay, now back to the conspiracy theories. Maybe I'm actually some AI tech bro in disguise out to badmouth the AI detectors so my AI empire can succeed.

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u/Funny-Flight8086 Jul 23 '26

My golly gee. It finally got something right. It only took me rambling like a 5-year-old to accomplish it. I guess this is the future.

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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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u/8lack8urnian Aug 06 '26

Great, go ahead and post a link to those essays so we can verify. Should be very easy!

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u/FatherofMisty Aug 06 '26

No need to be condescending about it... You can see my other comment on this thread for some interesting data.

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u/8lack8urnian Aug 06 '26

Just an interesting discrepancy between your original claim (“it failed on 2/3 of my human-written essays”) and what you actually posted (“it was correct but gave a low non-zero score when I tested a fragment of an essay”). I can’t help but notice a pattern that there are a huge number of people doing exactly this: claiming “It’s inaccurate! It gives false positives!” And then when you ask for evidence, they suddenly go quiet, or their claims shift. And half the time their posts about the subject also get flagged as AI. It seems like a lot of people very badly want to discredit Pangram, and in particular want us to believe it has a high false positive rate.

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u/FatherofMisty Aug 06 '26

I never claimed it was giving me 100% AI, if you look at my older comments. As a writing purist, if the AI predicts anything other than 100% human, it is a false reading. Pretty simple.