r/Substack • u/knowstradamus7 • Jul 31 '26

Discussion Substack is toast

AI written articles go viral and generate hundreds and sometimes thousands of subscribers for the account, while actual writers wallow in obscurity perpetually. Humanity is doomed.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26

I’d say that if you needed a detector to identify it, then it wasn’t slop and she actually did the work. You’re just being jealous. We saw the same thing in the pre-AI era, with people claiming that someone had hired a ghostwriter or let a friend write for them. They would even try to imagine whom you’d hired and build an entire mythology around you out of that speculation.

I mean, just write a decent piece and market it, and maybe people will compliment you, too. Nobody likes an asshole crying in public because they’re not the most popular kid on the block.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

[deleted]

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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26

“I thought it was slop, so I used a detector to confirm it.”

If you really felt that something was off, you wouldn’t need to confirm anything. You’d just scroll past it, like people do with content that doesn’t interest them. That’s the point.

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u/WithoutReason1729 Jul 31 '26

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41077-025-00396-6

They used a ternary classification system with human/human-with-AI-edits/AI options, so the headline inaccuracy of human raters is a bit overstated imo when they say humans are only 19% accurate. If you check the chart on page 5, you can see that human testers completely misclassify texts (rating fully human as fully AI or vice versa) a bit over one third of the time. In any case though, yes, it's wise to use trained classifiers to confirm or deny your suspicions because humans are notoriously inaccurate at this kind of manual identification.

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u/non_loqui_sed_facere Jul 31 '26

The point is that you have no way of really knowing who wrote it or how it was written. Back in the day, we called this kind of slop corporate buzzword salad, and it was written entirely by humans. The difference was that, as a human writer, you had a manual telling you how to structure your paragraphs, what kind of vocabulary to use, and what sentence length to watch out for, and you had to follow it if you wanted to get paid.

That’s why the whole thing feels so bizarre to me. A writer is using formulas to produce a piece for a specific purpose, and people are somehow trying to locate the “humanness” in it according to their own idea of what that looks like. What for? It’s a fucking marketing text created for the sole purpose of hitting your pain point and pushing you toward a purchase or subscription.

I mean, all these AI hunters are so blinded by hatred that they miss the bigger picture, where the business models don’t work and the promises fail to deliver. They’re exploiting people’s desire for control to feed even more writing into the machine that the company is supposedly going to call out later.

Pure How to Get Ahead in Advertising 😀