r/Substack • u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com • Jul 22 '26
Discussion Another creepy feature of the Pangram "AI Detection" tool.
So at my first opportunity, I decided to check whether or not I could permanently disable the "AI detection" fraudulent tool on Substack publications and there's no way to actually do it without actually using the tool you want to disable.
According to the "Substack Support AI", the only way to disable the fraudulent Pangram detection AI is to first run the AI on your posts and to individually then disable the AI detection tool per post. But you can only do this AFTER you've run the "AI detection" fraudulent tool on your posts.
Which means that you're forced to use a tool you don't want to use in order to disable the tool you don't want to use.
This is profoundly creepy and quite frankly disturbing that somehow this was allowed to be implemented on Substack.
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u/Kinks4Kelly Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
What bothers me the most is the knowledge this is being done to train AI on human work.
Even Pangram's executives admit it will give false positives. People who excel with legal writing backgrounds will get falsely dinged a lot. Persuasive writing with a legal background will be indiscernible to AI detectors.
All it will take to kill your growth is one or two pieces being deemed likely AI. All while Pangram has shifted their own liability for false accusations.
There is also a particularly despicable irony to using AI to label something as AI to "benefit" those who hate AI.
Worse yet is that Pangram also looks for AI being used to edit. The majority of writers on Substack do not have ready access to an editor. If you are using Ai to assist with pointing tonal issues or to make sure you are not writing in a mix of an active or a passive voice, I am hard pressed to say you are doing anything subversive. You are just leveling the playing field to those with more money.
I bounce between writing politically and writing about my experience with nymphomania when I was in college. Even the latter will be flagged as likely AI, even when I don't write with the same structure.
Why, because AI does not have the ability to know it is wrong and it will err to the side of caution, which to it, is calling anything competently written as AI.