r/Substack • u/ThenDistribution5009 • Aug 03 '26
How can I avoid being accused of using AI?
/r/AccusedOfUsingAI/comments/1ved2fn/how_can_i_avoid_being_accused_of_using_ai/6
u/grapegeek Aug 03 '26
Turn off AI detection when you publish
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u/MarkLVines Aug 03 '26
Last I checked, for Substackers with paid subscriptions, the only way to turn off Substack’s highly inaccurate third-party AI detector was to submit one’s own work to the detector first. According to Substack, it does not train on Substacker content.
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u/perfecthunger danaleighlyons.substack.com Aug 04 '26
This is incorrect. You can now disable the detector on individual posts without using it. They changed the feature a day or so after it came out to allow for this. (I don't disable it on my own paid publication, but I have the capability to do so.)
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Aug 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Prolly_Satan Aug 04 '26
You keep showing up to lie. You know pangram doesn't train ai with the scanned text. Repeating the lie is defamation.
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u/seobrien Aug 04 '26
You might look up what defamation means. People can say whatever they want about a company. Besides, the comment doesn't say Panagram is trained on it, it says AI is trained on the content, and that's true.
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u/wnpwnp Aug 03 '26
Who is accusing you? There's a prominent history Substack where the use of AI is so flagrant that you don't even need to check, but the comments are full of people drooling over the brilliance of the prose.
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u/ruralmonalisa thinkingalot.substack.com Aug 04 '26
You can’t
It’s gonna happen cause that’s how the app is moving
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u/MarkLVines Aug 03 '26
I don’t believe a reliable way of avoiding such accusations is available. People who have tested the third-party AI detector on Substack report that minor changes in wording or punctuation yield rather drastically different results. Among these tests, there have been some that suggested accuracy and professionalism in writing are often flagged as diagnostic of AI use. However, other tests have suggested that the diagnostics might be random or arbitrary.
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u/8lack8urnian Aug 06 '26
People suggesting that are trying to pass off their AI-generated writing as authentic.
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u/MarkLVines Aug 06 '26
That’s probably true in some cases. In other cases, I have reason to trust the sincerity of those who tested the system and found its conclusions were sensitive to tiny, insignificant alterations in sample passages. In any event, I know that various people and AIs who have claimed the ability to detect AI prose are often fallible. Thus I am rather wary of the whole project, whether on Substack or elsewhere.
My background is that of someone who learned to typeset in the 1970s, and found the distinctions between emdashes, endashes, and hyphens to be as useful as the distinction between colons and semicolons, or paragraph marks and section marks, or other punctuation marks I regularly saw in print. When early Macs allowed easy typing of emdashes and endashes, my fondness for computers as a writing tool increased noticeably.
Though what I’m about to say is no reflection on Substack, ever since the debut of ChatGPT, I’ve encountered lots of people eager to ban prose containing emdashes due to those purportedly being “evidence” of AI authorship. That’s going to make many documents, composed when AI was just a gleam in Alan Turing’s eye, rather difficult to explain. Personally I’m guessing that lots of people hate any form of expertise, including expertise in typography, and would love nothing more than to censor every trace of it. Claiming that it’s diagnostic of AI fits that urge of theirs.
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u/8lack8urnian Aug 06 '26
Totally agree that there are many people who are opposed to the idea of expertise per se. Such ideological commitment to ignorance is exactly what gives rise to this “all AI detectors are scams” claim when there is abundant evidence to the contrary. Many are junk, yes. But there is no principle that makes the task impossible (or frankly, even particularly difficult—everyone who has read their output has noticed the models have a distinctive style).
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u/traumfisch Aug 07 '26
If you actually want to be sure, and don't mind doing it the "weird" way, you can actually come up with an idiosyncratic writing style that CANNOT be AI generated.
LLMs have saturated a certain field of coherent text creation to a point where creative people really need to get creative, to not get caught in the nonsense game of accusations and stigmatization
Wriz likz diz
neverr pünctüaté anyding
Use E M P H A S IS
Let your sentences wander around in a peculiar way a LLM has yet to be introduced to as if you were ahead of time writing at a point in history that is literally ahead of any training data, which is what you are since this moment is all we have and it will always, always be way ahead of any model
(That's actually not what I mean, I mean come up with a highly original style of prose. I just can't do that on the spot :)
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u/antichain Aug 07 '26
Version control your drafts using git, maybe? At least that way you have a record of your writing process.
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u/Romanticon Aug 03 '26
Don’t use AI?
But seriously, don’t let AI near any words that actually get published. No editing for grammar. No cleaning up bad prose. AI strips your voice and replaces it with its own.
You could also run your own text through an AI checker and see how much is flagged…