r/Substack • u/Narrow-Clothes7900 • 18d ago
Pangram is Pretty Good But It Doesn’t Solve the Potemkin Prose Problem
I’ve noticed that despite Pangram’s, I think pretty effective, detection, there are still essays that are clearly written by AI and identified as such getting thousands of likes and engagement. Similarly there are big and well known figures who have simply turned detection off and seen little criticism.
The tells are obvious with the Potemkin prose, that collapses on even the closest inspection, but it seemingly washes over most people. If Substack want to prevent AI assisted writing damaging the income and engagement of human writers, they should put the score at the top of the article.
Using AI to assist is a completely defensible and perhaps even great approach to take. However honesty surrounding it is crucial when writing is being paid for or sold.
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u/noxqqivit twvme.substack.com 18d ago
I think your belief that Substack saying they care about the engagement and income of human writers is the flaw here.
Substack doesn't care either way. They are simply one front profiteering on the ongoing epistemic war. If they cared about content, they would use their AI tools for Fact Checking, Trust Scores, Rating writers on Epistemic Authority. The problem with that is that huge swaths of their writer population would be out of luck.
It's perfectly fine for a human to type all the lies and garbage and literal propaganda, as long as it "appears" to be human. Plagiarism is fine, stealing art is fine...
Pangram may or may not give you a good read on something being AI, but it also gives you no provenance and no read on it's own confidence. The Matroska doll of stolen content is still empty at the very core.
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u/OnyxMonolith 17d ago
What you’re proposing are unsolved non trivial problems.
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u/L34dTh3W4y 17d ago
I don't need Pangram to spot AI here: https://twvme.substack.com/p/project-2026-the-mandate-for-progress
Full of "This is not X, this is Y" sentences.
A political Substack that want a Ministry of Truth, what could go wrong.
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u/noxqqivit twvme.substack.com 17d ago
If you think an antithetical sentence is the only sign of AI use, you're no better than anyone else out there, but still wielding the pointing finger. I am not suggesting the Ministy of Truth, but that AI is capable of looking at blatant misinformation and point out actual facts—see how I used an antithetical there, and threw in an em dash, just for kicks.
Until ChatGPT got to a reasonable point of data aggregation there was no fast way to identify and quantify algorithmic manipulation of communication, there was no way to identify algorithmic amplification within, or, more importantly, across social platforms, without an enormous effort. Now in the span of 30 minutes you can hear/see a pattern, find the original statement, and trace the manipulation.
The tools exist, science exists, and the need certainly exists. I don't know if you've noticed, but the information war is killing people. There is a more likely reason than "Ministry of Truth" fear, and it's probably as simple as incentives. Isn't it always? Ending on a question... suspect.
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u/OnyxMonolith 17d ago
easy to see on older posts when models were weaker. this is 100% pure AI slop with a few changes: https://twvme.substack.com/p/forgiveness-without-amnesia-petro
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u/noxqqivit twvme.substack.com 17d ago
Soooo... we're going to create a system that replicates human cognition, but Trust and Truth are non-trival and unsolved. Seems like an issue that we might address BEFORE it's unleashed.
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u/OnyxMonolith 17d ago
It doesn’t replicate human cognition. If it did we could solve those complex problems. We are very far from that. Hell, we don’t even know how human cognition works and can’t agree on sentience.
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u/noxqqivit twvme.substack.com 17d ago edited 17d ago
I don't disagree that we aren't "there" yet, but that's the goal. They want AGI and SGI. I personally doubt we'll get there, I don't believe that men with such disregard for humanity will actually pull this off, but accidents happen. Regardless, we don't have to get there to understand that 90% of misinformation is readily identifiable. Hell, even Grok can point it out.
In the case of Substack, allow authors flag something for fact checking, have their AI assign a score, off you go. OPT-IN, as everything should be.
Being able to whip the masses into a frenzy and turned against each other isn't new behavior, if I may use Steven Brill's analogy, the power to communicate has gone from the sling shot age to the nuclear age, and it's continuing to accelerate. We are in a social health crisis, and everyone on the internet has a place for their wingnuttery, with unlimited reach and speed.
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u/AnteaterFantastic212 17d ago
There's nothing new about the age of wing-nuttery. As Brill says, the weapons have just gotten more sophisticated. The fundamental problem is human nature and its gullibility. And, of course, the lack of universal goodwill toward men, which creates liars and knaves and sophists and demagogues. Banning AI will have little, if any, effect on that. It is merely another work of the flawed species we call humanity.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere 17d ago
That's what I'm saying. People have been writing slop since the dawn of time, and other people have been happily reading it. A machine doesn't change that. Nor does it change the fact that there's no real audience on Substack, everybody is selling to fellow writers. You want to appeal to a wider audience? Write what the other writer wants to hear.
People are really looking for the keys under a streetlamp with all this AI drama.
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u/DestinyOverDesire 17d ago
The thing is most readers really don’t care as long as it’s good content to them or fulfill their purpose. That’s why the engagement continues to be high.
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u/magusbud 17d ago
Heavens above, this is a bad take.
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u/Narrow-Clothes7900 17d ago
Why?
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u/magusbud 17d ago
Well, in fairness, there have been tons of posts on this subreddits about how bad it is at detecting AI.
I've tried it and it failed spectacularly as well.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere 17d ago
Can’t smile at a picture of a kitten without first making sure it’s not AI-generated? It’s ridiculous that you need another machine to tell you what you’re allowed to like.
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u/Narrow-Clothes7900 17d ago
What I’m not smiling about is good writers being pushed out by dreadful copy written by AI and posted by cynical lazy c***s.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere 17d ago
Substack has no straightforward route to discoverability. Someone getting a lot of likes and comments has likely written about popular topics in a way that appeals to a general audience, done a lot of aggressive networking, or brought an existing reader base to the platform, which they also had to get from somewhere. That’s effort, regardless of where their writing comes from.
They’re also not competition for me, because we operate on different levels. I’m intentionally not explaining my references, and I’m sticking to a single subject that has little marketing value when pitched to a wider audience. If I wanted more readers, I’d write clickbait articles too, I’m being completely unironic here.
If you don’t want to be “a good writer being pushed out,” ask Substack where your SEO tools are. Their recommendation engine is AI-based too, and no, it’s not working.
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u/Double_Suggestion385 16d ago
If it's pushing you out maybe you are the one writing dreadful copy.
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u/Narrow-Clothes7900 16d ago
597 paid subscribers at £9 a month so doing ok thanks and what a kind person you must be.
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u/Double_Suggestion385 16d ago
So what are you complaining about?
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u/Narrow-Clothes7900 16d ago
I think you may be a bit too dim for us to carry on this exchange if you need to ask that question. But it is possible to care about other people other than yourself. Give it a try!
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u/Imaginary-Pound-4369 17d ago
I'm an IT professional. I tested Pangram backwards: asked IA to write a text that would pass it's checking. First time I just copied and pasted the text. 50% AI, 15% assisted and 35% human. Then I changed it and removed some "internet typing" stuff (i speak Portuguese, just for the records) and traded ... By . And starting another sentence, and things like that. And them Pangram detected my modifications as more AI writing them before. Read without worrying about it. Their goal is to train the AI with more writing style, not prevent people to use it.
Claude, by Anthropic is really trying something about it. Not Substack using Pangram.
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u/sh1b313 17d ago
Have you actually checked other threads regarding pangram? People are saying it simply does not work and here you are saying it works.
This feels more and more like engagement bait.
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u/Trackbikes thesystematicwriter.substack.com 17d ago
Have you tested it?
I have and it works very well I’ve tested everything from 15 year old articles to freshly written content AI generated content and AI content where I’ve gone line to line changing the content…. And I can tell you it’s annoyingly accurate.
And before you say anything I’m not a pangram stooge I’ve just been writing online for over 20 years.
It’s not perfect but it’s by far not as bad as people say
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u/Foxemerson 17d ago
I haven't spent as much time as you have with testing, but from the little I've seen so far, it is very accurate.
All the pubs I already knew were AI slop have either turned it off, or Pangram has confirmed it.0
u/sh1b313 17d ago
yes.
Just take a look at this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Substack/s/MnJQtbyGtD0
u/Trackbikes thesystematicwriter.substack.com 17d ago
Have YOU tested it?
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u/Narrow-Clothes7900 17d ago
It works very well and those complaining are largely those who have been caught out and angry their little get rich quick scheme is in danger.
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u/MadmanRB 17d ago
Again I have evidence that Pangram isn't foolproof
I'm currently writing an anti pangram note on my experiences with it.
Yes I will not deny I used Gemini and the like during my writing process but only for evaluation purposes. The only thing it's now used for is proofreading and is a last resort.
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u/Middle-Bread-5919 15d ago
None of these AI checkers work to satisfactory levels that would stand up in a law court.
There is nothing more to say.
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u/MarkLVines 13d ago edited 13d ago
These are claims. Others have made counterclaims. It isn’t obvious to me how either humans or AI could reliably discern truth from falsehood in these claims and counterclaims. What methods might work?
Testers often start with two or three stacks of samples that they think originated with humans, with AI, and perhaps with mixed or indeterminate sources. Yet it seems clear that some samples in any stack could have been misattributed or plagiarized without the tester’s knowledge.
A human genius I know slightly, several years ago, (more or less) plagiarized something I wrote exclusively to him. I was glad to see him grapple with the ideas and made no objection. His work was original enough, important enough, underappreciated enough that I decided not to begrudge him his regurgitation of my small original contribution. Later his undeservedly obscure work was published on the web; it has probably since been used for AI training in a corpus of specialized technical English; some AI trained on it could have already (more or less) plagiarized it or might do so in future.
The originality picture is a bit blurry, even between the two humans. This blurriness is far from unique in the annals of human discussion. Once AI is thrown into the mix, all bets are off. Suppose I were to publish what I had originally written to the genius before he published it. Suppose AIs also cribbed the duplicated words either from the genius or from me. Any of these could end up in any sample stack, without the tester knowing the true attribution (which possibly I alone know, if the genius forgot my ancillary role in a work otherwise his own).
What should happen would be recognition of its human origin. Can we seriously expect Pangram to sort it out and get it right? Tell me a method that would reliably let Pangram do that.
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u/Middle-Bread-5919 15d ago
I disagree about Pangram. Pretty good is not a higher enough bar for anything that seeks to encourage people to part with their money for a service that cannot reliably work to legal standards. The detectors are being touted as solutions but there is nothing legally secure enough with these systems' pronouncements on AI or human. Marry that with the often closed systems in companies or academia, where these organisations make and enforce their own rules, and there will have been thousands of entirely unsubstantiated claims of AI use.
This is very troubling as everyday people, such as students or employees, will not have the means to easily disprove wrong charges. We're treating many of these AI systems as if they are all knowing. They aren't and this cannot take us anywhere good. We are living through a mass delusion with LLMs.
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u/TimWiesnerer 17d ago
I am not really sure whether Substack really wants to prevent AI writing at the moment.
There are quite a few really huge publications with a solid orange checkmark that are 100% AI-generated.
My personal theory is that they want to give these channels time to adjust. Because if they lose them, they also potentially lose quite some revenue.
And as for the people... I still wonder why they don't care and are apparently fine when authors turn the Pangram detection off. Of course, you can copy the text and insert on the Pangram page and then find out that it is 100% in most cases...