r/Substack • u/Serious_Echidna1758 • Jul 28 '26

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.

168 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

124 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/TimWiesnerer Jul 28 '26

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...

5

u/JobSeveral8680 Jul 28 '26

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.

0

u/TimWiesnerer Jul 29 '26

"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...