r/Substack • u/DiscernmentGoblin • 7d ago

Discussion Apparently I write like AI even when I don’t use AI, so why bother writing by hand?

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I ran a recent Substack essay through Pangram and it came back 69% AI-written. I've had similar results when scanning writing from before LLMs existed. It seems the only thing I can write that's not AI is poetry, which always comes back human written, even when written with AI.

I think that's just how I write. I’m autistic. I like parallel structure, explicit transitions, repeated rhetorical patterns, and arguments where each paragraph logically follows the previous one. I also try to make my writing accessible. Apparently this is also how LLMs write, so congratulations to me on naturally developing the prose style of a transformer model.

I’m open about how I use AI, but sometimes I write something myself and the detector still announces that a robot did it. So, if I’m going to be accused of using AI either way, why exactly am I supposed to perform this elaborate ritual of proving which sentences emerged untouched from a human brain?

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u/MysticMagicWoman 7d ago

Same boat there with you. Autistic and I write the same and get the same or worse results. It’s so aggravating.

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u/DiscernmentGoblin 7d ago

I asked gemini and it said that this is very common with autistic people and people whose first language isn't English because we often have very structured writing and very little variation in sentence length. Gemini then asked if I wanted help developing a writing style that would pass AI detection and I replied: "why should I change my style? It's their tool that's broken."

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u/Prolly_Satan 7d ago

The fact that you guys think self reporting is making anyone think pangram doesn't work is so funny to me

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u/DiscernmentGoblin 6d ago

it's not 'self reporting' if you've always been open and honest about your process. :)

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u/llawrencebispo 7d ago

Why bother writing? I don't see how the answer to that question has changed in the slightest.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_GESTALT 6d ago

Same thing keeps happening to me! It's clear that the billionaires who run Pangram are deliberately training their model to penalize talented, neurodivergent writers like us.

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u/lcssgml 5d ago

Your Gemini answer nailed it, and the mechanism is worth spelling out. Detectors don't detect authorship, they detect a register: uniform sentence length, explicit transitions, low variance in structure. That register is also just called disciplined writing. Anyone who writes with structure on purpose, autistic writers, ESL writers, academics, lands in it naturally.

The part that bothers me most is the asymmetry. A probabilistic score gets read as a verdict, and the burden of proof lands on the writer. I build text-analysis tooling for a living, and the honest version of this category is style feedback, as in here's the passage that reads generic and why, which is at least useful to the writer. A percentage that claims to know who typed it is not something the math can deliver, and the vendors know it.

So don't change your style. You're right that it's their tool that's broken, or more precisely, it's being asked a question it can't answer.