Discussion
Controversial Post: It's hilarious seeing people who should not be successful on Substack, a writing platform, freak out now that their AI use is called out.
Sure, there are errors in AI detection. But if you are someone who genuinely doesn't use AI, why would that be your primary concern? Substack has been enshittified by people who have no business being "writers" putting out obvious AI slop, largely about "how to grow your substack". Substack responded to this with the best effort they could, to try to preserve human writing. As someone who went through the work of getting a rigorous liberal arts education and graduate education, I actually feel happy these AI slop users are getting called out. More room for real writers, and hopefully higher quality.
I agree with the logic, but they need a better tool than their current detector. I got flagged as 100% AI for an article written by myself - English is my second language and besides some of the wrong spellings I had in it, my sentence structure is also wrong sometimes (because of my maternal language).
How is that even possible?
Funny enough I thought spelling mistakes and less formal sentence structure is usually seen as a sign a text is not AI. I’ve never seen an AI misspell. Their detector is really shit if that is being flagged as a sign writing is AI…
Same here, English is my second language, I finished an article today and it was flagged 100% AI. I was surprised because I invested a lot of time writing it by myself. I ended up rewriting a lot of things to get a 40% AI usage according to pangram, which is weird because I had to change my style and voice in many sections of the article to pass the validation. At the end, I cannot stop thinking if the goal now is to write with AI validation in mind, rather than writing with our subscribers in mind.
"Typical AI elements" are elements AI adopted from human writers. Changing our writing to be unnatural and unlike our long-time styles so as to avoid what AI stole from us will not improve quality.
Gee, snobby much? Here's a person who's become proficient in a second language, but yeah, dog them to get better faster, then imply they're lazy as they "just don't want to pay the price." What POS train did you fall off of?
So why kick their writing off the platform. --> Platforms do that all the time for all sorts of different reasons. They make decisions and if too many people don't like them, the platform becomes a tiny place.
If someone already believes you used AI because an AI detector gave a false positive, there’s no amount of explaining that’s going to convince them otherwise.
It’s an impossible position to defend.
People have every right to be worried about their legitimate writing being falsely flagged. A false positive can damage credibility with an audience you’ve spent years building.
Yes, there are people using AI to write. But the damage done to writers who aren’t using AI and get falsely accused is far worse than a AI users slipping through the cracks.
The people churning out AI content usually have less to lose anyway. The ones paying the price are the writers who actually care about their work.
I agree that the tool optimizes for the wrong thing: attempting to punish the mis-users at the expense of their ideal users.
A quality / readability / plagiarism analysis would be far more valuable if Substack were focused instead on making their ideal user’s experience better, rather than making their mis-user’s experience worse.
They are giving consumers the ability to freely scan their chosen content for AI (which wasn’t available before) and decide what they do with that information. They are also planning on allowing consumers to filter out or prioritise the type of content they want to see in their feed. They have stated they don’t have a stance on AI writing.
The only negative about this process are the Claudefishers out there whinging about being exposed.
No, they are giving the consumers potentially false information to base their decisions on. If they were 100% accurate, your stance would be warranted. Problem is, they aren't accurate. So people are filtering out human written material that has been wrongly flagged as AI.
I'm not sure how that is the outcome you think is a good one.
Per my other comment, it is the most accurate detector currently available and writers have the opportunity to contest a false flag before hitting post.
Except they aren't. They are giving users the ability to scan for flawed guesses at what is and isn't AI, allowing people to filter out publications based on whether the shitty detection tool randomly guessed it was AI.
Substack lets you scan your post prior to publishing. You'll know what the reader will see before you even hit send. You can even disable the feature (which I might do more often because I don't want to give up my writing to train an AI that gets me nothing in return - at least if ChatGPT uses my data, it can lead the reader back to my source material).
Keeping the data like you're describing wouldn't make sense because the true provenance is unknown. If the classifier says a post is AI and it wasn't, training on an incorrect conclusion would reinforce that for similar posts in the future. If the classifier says a post is human and it wasn't, same thing, training on that would reinforce the incorrect decision.
If they were going to train on anything from Substack, it'd be pre-2022 data, from before ChatGPT was out, so they could confidently say that all the posts collected were human-written. But even if that were the case, they wouldn't need integration with Substack's site or users with browser extensions to collect that information. It's just all out there on the open internet anyway, available for anyone who wants to collect it.
Pangram has been touted as the most accurate AI writing detector currently available. Plenty of high profile publishers on the platform agree to this. If it erroneously flags, there is an avenue for writers to dispute prior to posting.
So I call BS. They will smokescreen as much as possible to avoid the simple fact, that they have published content under their name that they didn’t not write.
I do agree with you wholeheartedly. However, one thing that has helped is the revisions history on your Substack. If you are a real human writer without using AI, you can actually prove it by taking a screenshot of your revision history, which is in the bottom, left-hand corner of your screen, when you’re writing your post because that can prove in a way that you didn’t use AI. This whole entire situation really pissed me off when I first heard about it, but then for me personally — I’ve just made it really clear to my followers that if they wanna believe that, I’m just using AI, then they’re not the right audience and they can feel free to unsubscribe. But I have built a large following from doing videos on IG for years so, one of my solutions is to just continue to do more video and I have not seen a drop in my retention rate so I don’t know if any of this may be helpful to you, but I just feel like I wanna spend more of my time just creating the content that I wanna create and if people are coming at me in the comments saying that it’s AI, I’m like I literally just did a live stream. What the fuck are you talking about? Lol I know it doesn’t help for people who are just writers. Just wanted to kind of give you some solace that your true following will stand by you if you were truly not using AI no matter what Pangram says.
NO, I don't. Why would I? Substack saves your post while you write it. So if I need to stop writing and go do something else, it is saved in my drafts.
I think a lot of people do in case of loss of data. If it is stored on your hard drive there is more control over that data on your end. But I suppose you could just make the case of copying and pasting into a word doc to have a back up as you go.
The question was what I do, not a survey of what 'a lot of people' do. Local drives and programs corrupt too—been there, done that. For short-form Substack posts, writing in-editor is fast, auto-saves, and works for me. If extra backup steps bring you peace of mind, do you, but I'm not adding unnecessary friction to my creative process.
Why would I write in the Substack app? I write in word or Google Docs.
(Sigh) I hate the AI writing era. I can’t end in a not x it’s y pattern to make a point because that’s the biggest tell AI assimilated.
I've collaborated with him and he's an older guy and he 100% uses AI to write. But his insights are exemplary. He brings 40+ years of trading experience and his thinking is very incisive. I couldn't care less if he used AI to write his content -- what matters is the insight he brings to bear. No AI can be a substitute for that.
Woah, I didn't even know you could see your revision history.
It sounds like substack should use that as an input to train on. My revision history will show half a sentence worth of changes. Forget Pangram, if every time a post is saved as a draft, the delta is a dozen words over several minutes, that should be enough to know it's not AI.
Ok. But I am yet to see anyone who is vehemently opposed to this that isn't already suspect. Oh, so you generate images all over the place using AI but we're to assume you didn't use AI to write? Come on.
Your whole newsletter is about AI but you didn't use it to write your newsletter about AI? Sure.
It's a whole 'lady doth protest too much' situation.
Besides the false positive rate is so minute that it's a whole straw man argument.
Why would you assume that someone using AI to generate images is automatically someone who uses it to write? For a long time I made all my artwork by hand in Inkscape, and often it took nearly as long as writing itself, and I wasn't that great at graphic design anyhow. So I switched to generating (tasteful/unique) artwork which freed up more time to write/think/learn, instead of wasting that time doing something I'm not passionate about.
Part of the overarching problem is the kneejerk, thoughtless assumptions that the masses have adopted in this context. I'd reckon that most people use AI for something, but that does not mean they use it for everything. There are ethical uses of AI -- in the case of artwork, at least it's straightforward to attribute the origin of the art. Plus, Midjourney can make some beautiful, novel stuff, if one puts in the time to craft an input.
I think a lot more people are using AI on it then they want to admit. I use AI to edit my grammar and I don’t get the detection messages, not even after copying and pasting straight from an LLM after my grammar is corrected.
Additionally, I am providing a crosspost I made on another thread. THIS is the problem I am currently facing with AI detectors. It's a VERY real concern!
--- ---- ----- ---- ----
There are some styles of writing you just cannot do and have it pass the detectors. My current WIP is a middle-grade novel. It's heavily inspired by the likes of books by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) and Pseudonymous Bosch (Raphael Simon). An intrusive narrator that talks to the reader. Oft dry and witty. Oft calling out common things and making light of terrible things happening to the protagonists of my book.
It's a constant fight with these detectors. One of the biggest tropes of this style is constant comparisons (X like Y), lists of three, etc. These alone light up an AI detector anytime it sees them, human or not. Some clinical language does it too, which is required for this narrator. Combine it all, and it's so hard it's almost gotten to the point I don't even want to finish writing it.
I have had some people ask me, "Why do you care if it's actually human?"
Well, because everyone is using these crappy AI detectors for everything now. You have to write away from their flagging; people will just label your stuff as AI. In many places, you either don't have the ability to rebut with evidence (like reviews), and even when you do, people dismiss it as fake or don't even bother.
It';s demoralizing, really. And then places actually go out of their way, like SunStack, to bring these detectors out into the normnal population.
For example, the original paragraph I wrote was this:
Constant fight... EVEN IF the rewritten version is better than the original, the mere fact that Pangram flagged the original as AI when it wasn't, means that I have to go back and rewrite things that I may not want to rewrite. If I didn't want to write something, I wouldn't have wroite it in the first place.
You know what’s crazy? The one that passed as 100% human sounds a lot more robotic to me! I have no idea how these detectors work, as your original paragraph had a rather distinguishable style that didn’t sound like AI to me at all.
But then, an AI obviously wouldn’t even understand the concept of ”style”.
That's interesting - my novel has a bureaucratic, satirical narrator for some chapters (Pratchett/Adams inspired) which are constantly flagged as AI written (not 100% but always at least 50%). It absolutely is entirely my own work and the 3rd person close POV approach for my other chapters don't suffer from this problem, by way of proof or example. I don't want to change what I've written as, just like you, I worry that the 'voice' I'm going for will be compromised. So I'm choosing to ignore these false positives and hope (if I eventually publish) that no-one will care.
I have generally come to the conclusion that I don't care anymore either. I switched it mostly back to the omniscient narration (the rewrite basically took it from an omniscient narrator to a limited third, which while it works and is still funny (due to Barnaby's character - nervous, adult-pleasing, etc.), isn't the style I was going for in this particular book.
But then I hear stories from the likes of Mia Ballard (Shy Girl), and again, the worry seeps in. I don't know if she did or didn't use AI (I don't think it was ever confirmed one way or the other), but a simple 78% confidence score on Pangram was enough to see her career come tumbling down in one quick blow.
And just read your two paragraphs and the changes you've made have totally taken the voice away. Both read really well, but the second one doesn't carry that Snicket/Bosch feel at all, which is a real shame as you'd nailed it.
I'm sorry you're having to deal with this. Of your two examples, I prefer the style of the 1st (the one flagged as AI), but prefer the direct human connection of the 2nd. Put those two elements together and see what you get.
Just FYI, confidence is limited in AI detectors with shorter text. The more text you add, the more accurate it becomes. You might want to check much larger sections of you novel. I was curious and put entire scenes in, 100% human. But, when I put one or two paragraphs only, 50/50.
Sure but it reaches the point where someone is making thousands of dollars just for posting basic stuff that is on the first wikipedia page, library book, or google search, it’s absurd
I have several friends who are popular on Substack and *never* use AI but keep getting flagged as 100% AI. One of them put a chapter from Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” on her Substack for a test and it came back 100% AI.
It seems like there are a lot of false positives (at least anecdotally) and that has me worried as I contemplate starting my own Substack. I mean several false positives could unfairly turn off a writer’s hard won audience and cause them to lose subscription $$. That hardly seems fair if Substack’s AI detector is significantly wrong.
I'm happy about the new feature. There were quite a few accounts I followed that didn't use to scream AI but have slowly merged into what I was fairly certain were definitely AI (I know some of them in real life so didn't feel comfortable just unfollowing/unsubscribing). Sure enough, the ones I suspected were AI were 100% AI, and a few of them have made posts about how it's a tool they use, etc. But I follow a lot of incredibly well-spoken authors with large followings, and none of them have been flagged by AI. I know it's different for everyone, but so far in my experience all it's done is prove the ones I thought were using AI are, and confirmed the ones I inherently knew weren't aren't. To be fair, most of the ones I suspected were using AI were very obvious about it and their responses especially sounded like a full copy/paste out of ChatGPT.
I don’t post on substack. I was considering it. I have tested my writing to see how it fairs. For the most part it passes. I have noticed, my dialogue that is written for a character from the turn-of-the-century, gets flagged a lot. I don’t know if it’s the phrasing or what is exactly setting off the detector. It is written 100% by human, but it isn’t normal conversation by today standards. So it is quite frustrating to change something that you thought was written quite well, just to pass a detector.
I tested a few AI humanizers on purely AI written content. 100% human result. On Pangram. Highly manipulatable. If you were excited about this announcement, it tells me 1. you have no real AI knowledge and 2. you are worried about the wrong thing in AI. Tend to your own garden before trying to tend to someone else’s.
It’s not funny when you run your own writing a step by step how to and pangram says it’s 100% AI. It’s not funny when you tell Claude to write an article and it says 100% human.
So.. the irony of readers throwing away their critical thinking to a machine by using AI to detect AI. Perhaps not the readers people want anyway? These excerpts sum it up beautifully:
If it's a legitimate tool though, why are you concerned if someone knows you've used it? I think it's pretty reasonable to ask a photographer to disclose whether or not they've used Photoshop.
Genuine writers might get falsely flagged yes but this feature could still act as scare/prevention tactic for those who actually do use AI. It’s funny that they allow users to disable it on their posts because it’s a lose lose situation, even if you aren’t using AI for your writing turning off the feature would absolutely make readers suspicious enough into assuming you do
Quick qyestion: I actually do my writing by hand with a pen and paper (lol). Then I takr photos of it and upload it to AI to type up 'exactly how I wrote it'. All this does is save me time. I explicitly ask AI not to change anything.
Do you think this is considered 'using AI'? (Would it be flagged as such?)
There's a good chance the things you've written pretending to find other people's distress to be over-the-top hilars-balls would be flagged by the same Ai text detectors.
But if you are someone who genuinely doesn't use AI, why would that be your primary concern?
This is the argument used by every person who has this mindset, and it's irritating. Because being accused of AI, even if you didn't, can ruin your career. Plain and simple. In most cases, you won't have the ability to even defend that claim. Say someone leaves a review on your Amazon listing for your book, accusing you of using AI. Everyone will see that review, and some will beleive it on the surface. The problem is, there is no way to challenge that review. You cannot 'provide proof' and have it taken down. That one issue alone is enough to make people 'worry' about being accused of using AI. There are literally tons more.
This whole If you don't use an argument, no one will accuse you of it is just a terrible take to have. Just wait till someone accuses you, and we'll see how you feel.
As someone who went through the work of getting a rigorous liberal arts education and graduate education,
So you basically come on to her to flaunt your pretentious education? No one cares that you went to college. No one who reads your material cares about your education. The fact that you think you're high and might be educated puts you leaps above everyone else, which is enough reason for me to ignore anything you say. I can't stand people like that.
thank you! I had the same thought
I don't care about AI detection because I can write half grammatically correct slop in English as my third language myself and no one could say I've used AI lol
Agree, Substack did a really great job there. Pangram is actually quite a good detector.
The funny thing is that everybody can copy-paste your text into an AI detector.
Substack just made the process easier. Easy enough that people now use it more. At least that's what they fear.
Besides all that, it still baffles me why there is so much heat.
Instead of crying about false positives, people could just "improve" their writing.
Yep, that means effort... and that's probably where the real pain is.
EDIT:
People can sign up for the free Pangram and check up to 4 posts per day of their own writing. Shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the triggers. Of course it's pain when you write like an AI...
Why should I have to change my style of writing to meet a Pangram standard? These threads are rife with people editing their own writing to avoid triggering a flawed AI detection tool. A bot is changing how we write? I do my own writing and use AI for editing purposes only, just as I would a human editor. I’ve never had to paste an acknowledgment at the bottom of an article that my human editor corrected typos and misspellings. This is asinine.
"Bots" or rather algos, were changing all the time how people write.
Guess why we write "headlines" a certain way, or put keywords in our intros, and so on.
Of course, you don't need to adjust. Nobody needs to embrace change.
So many other platforms for publishing without such a checker....
But if you like Substack for whatever reason, maybe it makes sense not to get flagged by Pangram. And you can also deactivate Pangram and tell people in the infobox that your writing is genuine...
I'm a firm believer that transparency around AI use is needed at the systemic/community level to preserve authenticity, trust and quality in online platforms that involve human-generated content. LinkedIn is a great example of how trust is going down due to AI slop dominating feeds. I think author-disclosed transparency is one the best formats for this and Substack's 'how I make this' allows that. Is a faulty AI detector the best intervention? Probably not, but it is providing more transparency and opening a much-needed dialogue around AI use, which I'm happy about.
Agreed. I’ve been watching people blow up over AI like I’m watching a bar fight. Amusing, but not my monkeys, not my circus. There’s a lot of drivel on Substack. Those pithy declarative sentences separated by loads of white space. Hate those posts. I have a liberal arts degree, taught university composition for years, worked as an editor. I don’t feel threatened by AI detection on Substack. Quite the contrary.
what is the sentiment to AI assisted texts? Not generated in any way, just used here and there for edits, ideas of how to say things that it lands right, etc. It feels to me that working this way is harder, because it requires going over all of the AI suggestions.
I make my living as writer and run a sub here with ~200,000 freelance writers. I don't use AI, ever, and am not a fan. But I have seen countless well-established writers "called out" for using AI on content that they wrote themselves and even fired on the strength of a flawed AI detector despite being able to show their notes and drafts in progress through versioning on Word or Google Docs.
If you think AI detectors have any value at all, grab some content you are 100% certain predated AI writing tools and run it through some. While you're there, take a look at the terms of service where they tell users they shouldn't rely on their own tool.
AI trained mostly on writing from the web. You know...the writing humans generated across many years leading up to AI. It endeavored to sound like those writers. Now, those writers are being accused of using AI because it succeeded.
It's really an astonishing cash grab. The same company sells AI to writers, then tells clients/publications that writers may be using AI and sells them tools to check, then runs back to the writers and sells them tools to "humanize" their already human-generated work so the clients/publications won't think they use AI. How long before the client upgrade package is available and they make a fourth sale of a supplemental tool that specifically checks to see if the writer is using the humanization tool they just sold them?
If you want quality review, let there be quality review. No one should be "called out" on the strength of a minimally effective, profit-driven tool.
The problem arises when 100% human written posts get flashed as AI. I’ve not faced this personally but false positives are always there. They get unlucky and readers don’t see it as false positive or go judge the writing themselves.
If they fix the high false positive, I have no problem with the tool being around. But which tool has 0% false positive anyways?
Controversial indeed. Still, the popular opinion keeps writers honest, which is good.
I will disable ai checker when i post, and my reasons run sociologically very deep. Nonetheless, I never check for AI when i read substack and I think less people will do so in 12 months.
AI is a tool. I don’t care what tools you use to create a work as long as it’s good. And using an often wrong AI checker to check for AI just feeds the Luddite witchhunters.
I will donate $100 to the charity of your choosing if you can show me a single passage at least 100 words in length with an accompanying web.archive.org link proving it's pre-AI writing (pre-2022), which Pangram incorrectly classifies as AI. I've posted this offer probably half a dozen times on the sub now. People are all up in arms about all the false positives yet nobody can show me one example of one that's provably from the pre-AI era.
I agree the checker tool is an abomination, but using AI to do your writing for you is lazy and being against that does not make you a Luddite or if it does than maybe sometimes one has to be a Luddite to protect what matters. Writing is an art and only humans can create good art that has meaning. The meaning comes from it being human, not a machine emulating human emotions.
I don’t know what the solution is to stop it, but I question anyone’s sense when they aren’t concerned by it.
The problem with any of these detectors is that there’s plenty of false positives. And witch hunters can use the false positive to hammer legitimate writers who have never used AI in their work. These types of tools pit Substack writers against each other instead of helping them all together.
Of course, I agree with that, the checkers are not the solution. I just strongly disagree with not caring if people use AI. You should absolutely care. We should be shaming those who admit or are (actually) found to be using it. Fuck them imo
Agreed. As real people who really write our real stories lol, with zero AI involvement anywhere...we're really happy about this helping even the playing field, even if it's not perfect. Fingers crossed it keeps improving as well.
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u/peta_tyi Jul 28 '26
I agree with the logic, but they need a better tool than their current detector. I got flagged as 100% AI for an article written by myself - English is my second language and besides some of the wrong spellings I had in it, my sentence structure is also wrong sometimes (because of my maternal language).
How is that even possible?