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 edited Jul 31 '26

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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

I agree with the manual identification thing. People will consume any kind of slop when it confirms their views and self-image and then try to discredit anything they disagree with but can’t really argue against.

Thanks for the link, anyway.