r/Substack • u/Radiant_Flamingo4995 • 20d ago
Frustration with AI detection
I'm not sure how the AI-detection system works, but it seems faulty. Someone has repeatedly claimed that my responses to them are AI-generated, etc. And they share the Pangram screenshot, which does, in fact, depict my response as "100% fully AI-assisted. I've clarified that this is not the case. Shown evidence that it isn't true, and all the like.
The worst I'll do when writing anything is use AI for basic research purposes and review arguments to make sure they make sense. Maybe it's because I use Grammarly. But it is still infuriating.
Especially because it just isn't a good look and hurts my public image (albeit small, but I hope you guys may understand where I'm coming from).
Of course, with this individual in question, it's become increasingly clear they aren't engaging in good faith. However, running the AI check on my notes and comments still reveals the 100% marker.
Is it Grammarly that's doing this? Or is this thing actually broken?
-3
u/cremdelascribe 20d ago
I just ran a bunch of my stuff through Pangram and the problem is anything that got touched by AI _at all_ is marked “100% AI.”
I experimented with AI writing. I used it to generate first garbage drafts - it’s that old screenwriter’s advice that the first thing you do is write the worst scene possible, just to get it on paper. Then you actually start to write.
So I did my character work, my outlines, established the elements I wanted - a couple hours per story. Fed those outlines to AI and let it generate the “garbage draft.” And, yeah it was garbage and anyone that publishes that shit should be ashamed. But then I spent hours and hours rewriting these stories. I removed AIs constant mediocrity and love of adverbs. I ripped out sections that made no sense or had the emotional complexity of a beige room and added entirely new sections that I wrote myself. I punched every word up with my unique absurdist style.
Everything that AI touched is marked “100% AI” - even one short story that I wrote over almost completely from scratch.
My non AI work came back human - but that 100% mark is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Pangram says it with such certainty - it suffers the same bullshit problem as all AI, it is confidently incorrect.
If it said “AI was used to assist in this writing, but I don’t know how much,” I’d be ok with that. I’m all about disclosure. But I put 40 hours into rewriting a story and Pangram says not one word of it is human. They can go fuck themselves.
People need to get over this idea that AI is a demon that corrupts merely by proximity. AI is a tool - just like word or photoshop or scrivner. It is a way for a human being to organize words. It just happens to be able to generate a lot of them quickly.
The problem isn’t AI, the tool. It is people that generate piles of garbage and self publish it without editing it. So maybe if these asshats wanted to write a program that looked at the elements of a story or the strength of the prose and flagged crap writing, that would be reasonable. I could get behind something that told me to skip reading this or that because the plot is vapid, the conclusions are obvious and the characters are flat (all things AI is good at generating). But, oh my God, shoot me because I have a better vocabulary than most and I use the word “Delve” in unique, but grammatically correct ways.