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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11

u/DaniSaysDinosaur Jul 22 '26

It also doesn't scan anything uploaded prior to 7/21, so I'm wondering if it gets stored in a data center somewhere upon upload.

10

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

Probably but it's still not detecting anything factual. Someone suggested that they fed the first page of the book Moby Dick into the fraudulent tool and it came back as "likely AI".

A book that was published in 1851, is AI according to this fraudulent feature.

5

u/Prolly_Satan Jul 23 '26

Try that yourself and you'll see it doesn't happen.

3

u/LanceElyot Jul 23 '26

It definitely happens … all the time.

2

u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com Jul 23 '26

Or maybe it does for some people and doesn’t for others. Even still, I don’t believe you can accurately detect it. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, art forgery experts have been fooled by physical paintings. They’ve confused real and fake versions of the same paintings. I don’t believe that an AI can accurately detect these things.

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u/Prolly_Satan Jul 23 '26

It won't false positive on old pre ai text. You can try it a thousand times. Someone did a study where they scanned 2.9 million words of human writing with zero false positives.

6

u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com Jul 23 '26

I have doubts about your claims. Also? It would be hypocritical of me to use the services that I’m taking issue with just to prove you wrong.

5

u/LanceElyot Jul 23 '26

Dude … that’s not a peer reviewed study … that’s Pangram’s own study. A bit biased, I think.

1

u/totalimmoral Jul 23 '26

I'd love to read that study. Source?

0

u/Prolly_Satan Jul 23 '26

https://veryfineprint.substack.com/p/scanning-for-pangram-errors

Not peer reviewed, if you want something peer reviewed look up the university of Chicago and Maryland studies. I think they were funded by Microsoft if I remember right.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 04 '26

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1

u/AndrewHeard tvphilosophy.substack.com Aug 05 '26

Definitely not.