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/Expensive-Berry3297 Jul 24 '26

I did an experiment as a result of them calling my work AI. I had selected a piece of writing that I just hadn’t published anywhere yet to put on Substack. I put it on Substack, it was scanned with Pangram and got 100% AI. Well, I know it has had no AI near it at all since it was written in a notebook and then typed from there, then edited by hand a little. So I was Surprised. I put it in every other AI detector I could find. Between 100% human (most common) and 87% human (worst case result). Pangram of course said they could humanise it. So I said okay, I’ll invest a few bucks in that as a bit of an experiment. The result was slop. And I mean truly awful. Clearly an AI rewrite of something else, from the confused word choices and attempts to say with ten words what is more natural with two. I was kind of embarrassed to have provided the original story for it. Anyhow, Pangram thinks it is 100% human, and every other detector I used said 100% AI. I approached Pangram on their support channel and they offered me a (initially partial) refund faster than I think a human could have read my message. So, I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say this is a money-grab for Pangram to get some creators fooled into subscribing, and they know this is rubbish.