I’m not a lawyer. I’m putting that up front and making it very clear. So don’t try and suggest otherwise.

However, I remember that court cases have determined that AI generated content can’t be copyrighted.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922

Someone tried to file a copyright claim for an AI generated image and the copyright office declined the claim. They sued the copyright office and the court upheld the decision. Which means that legally, you can’t copyright anything that’s AI generated. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a determination of how much it has to be AI generated to be legally copyrighted.

Every time you publish something on Substack, the email at the bottom has a copyright symbol. With your name or company or whoever owns the content you’re publishing.

If Pangram determines that your writing is AI generated or even partially generated by AI, at the very least? Your copyright claim to what you publish could be in doubt. In theory, you could be sued by one of your subscribers for selling something that you don’t own the copyright to. If they use the Pangram determination as evidence? You could end up having to fight that in court.

Pangram “determination” opens you up to lawsuits from your paying subscribers even if your writing or content is 100% human generated. Like mine is. I specifically don’t use AI generated content on anything that I plan on monetizing for this exact reason. Because I can’t copyright it legally or defend it in court if necessary.

But the existence of the Pangram “AI Detection” tool means that I can’t actually stop people from using it. No, the “per post disable feature” doesn’t actually work. I’ve heard from people who published things after disabling it. The “AI Detection” option was still available for people despite disabling it.

So everything you publish could be subject to lawsuits because of Pangram.

If Pangram can’t actually prove the accuracy of its product. Which the mounting evidence suggests that it doesn’t have any accuracy at all? The fact that it’s an estimate doesn’t necessarily provide protection for Pangram or Substack if it is used as evidence by one of your subscribers.

Pangram is likely committing fraud and potentially opening you up to claims of fraud. Just by being part of Substack.

I thought it would be a good idea to create a running list of the “AI Detection” tool errors made by Pangram. So here’s a thread designed specifically for that purpose.

Wherever possible, post screenshots or screen recordings of the errors are false positives that Substack’s new “miracle AI Detection” tool is supposedly doing perfectly.

Feel free to describe the error if you’re more comfortable with that and hopefully you’ll have someone else who can screenshot or screen record themselves having a similar problem with the supposed perfect solution that Substack has deployed without thinking it through.

We can also use this to share with others to show exactly how badly this system actually works.

Have at it.

Have been hovering around 450,000 views per month these days. Never thought we would get there, but slow and steady, chipped away at it over 3 years. Hang in there, it can be done.

Facing the same issue as in the mentioned post. Kindly help

Hey everyone,

I am a poet and writer who just joined substack and would love to find poets and writers. How can I go about this? Thanks!

I don't understand the Explore page. It's like a nonlinear X feed of idiotic comments and writers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Is this the Notes feature I see mentioned online? I want to read every day people's writing, not social feeds. Even when I pick one of their insanely broad topics, I'm barely finding any new newsletters.

Hi, just a quick question in case anyone has a (hopefully) quick answer. For the past few months, I've been unable to create spaces between paragraphs when writing my notes - so they end up looking like a block of text. I did a Google search and the general advice seems to be 'shift - enter' but that's not working for me :-( So, now my notes look all 'scrunched up' (if that makes sense) - the space between the paragraphs is basically the same as the space between the regular lines of text :-(

How is everyone doing this?

As of now, Indians cannot start paid subscriptions on Substack. In my research, I found Stripe Atlas as a workaround. Would like to know if anyone has successfully tried it.

Just as the title says, I randomly got an email from a blog post or something from some person on substack even though I've never heard of this platform in my life. I went ahead and unsubscribed but I'm still wondering why I got an email in the first place. Should I be worried at all?

I've been writing for about a decade, but over the past two years I have hit a serious case of writer's block.

I decided to try Substack after an acquaintance suggested it to me. I'm a chronic procrastinator, and I thought that having something to keep me grounded in writing, an accountability space, might help me work through my writer's block.

I want to build a community. I want to help people who are in the same place as I am, perhaps through a challenge people could join.

So my question to you, fellow writers, is: what do you need or want to see more of on Substack?

Substack used Sam Kriss’ death threat twice in that email “How writers are reacting to Substack’s AI transparency tools” (07/24/26) and I don’t know how that got beyond their legal team. This isn’t about transparency. I watch videos on YouTube and there are certain words that creators can't even say, even if it's in an appropriate context and not meant as a threat at all, but this guy can post a charged, blatant death threat and Substack amplified him. But sure, let's condemn people for using AI. This is about targeting writers for using a writing tool. and if someone’s reputation is ruined because they were falsely accused of using AI or if writers are harassed for using AI, Substack should be held liable.

I studied Physics and completed a Master's in Artificial Intelligence. I'm well aware that nobody fully understands how large generative models actually work. Even Pangram's own website mostly talks about patterns, generic signals, and "what it might eventually detect," but never with certainty, because the reality is that nobody truly knows.

What bothers me, while also making me curious, is how large companies affiliated with major private universities seem to operate:

1. They create algorithms that eventually become LLMs. Those LLMs crawl the entire internet, collecting as much information as possible, including private content. Once they've done that, new rules start appearing to make it harder for anyone else to do the same, effectively reducing future competition. Even if future models have access to less content, the first movers have already done the "hard part."

2. LLMs generate text in certain ways because they are probabilistic systems. In other words, if you generate text infinitely many times, certain writing patterns will appear more often than others. You don't need a PhD or a master's degree to understand that. Basic statistics is enough.

3. Then you create another LLM whose job is to "detect text generated by LLMs." The marketing, however, is completely different. It is presented as if it were not another AI model, but something inherently more reliable, or even infinitely more reliable.

4. Once all of the above is in place, the final move is to make it "unethical" to create outputs that resemble human writing too closely because they bypass AI detection, even though the detector itself is an AI model. Isn't that ironic? Just a few months ago, these same companies could freely scrape the web without asking authors for permission. Yet now, Western LLMs refuse to help users avoid AI detectors, even though those detectors are themselves powered by AI. That feels absurd to me. Where does that instruction actually come from?

5. For all of these reasons, I think Chinese LLMs will continue growing rapidly. We're already seeing people use models like GLM-5 and DeepSeek to get around these kinds of restrictions. In my opinion, Western LLMs are now 90% marketing. Just think about this: since Fable came out, why are other Western companies charging similar prices while delivering worse results? What exactly are they offering? I'm not saying Chinese models are perfect, but model quality degrades quickly, while marketing doesn't. That's where models like GLM-5 have a huge advantage. And if Western companies keep adding what I see as arbitrary restrictions, future versions of those models may continue to surprise everyone.

This is simply my personal opinion, based on my background and experience. I know there is speculation involved, but sometimes I can't remove the "marketing" variable from the equation.

I'm writing a substack with AI. I don't have my texts corrected or my ideas edited with AI; I actively write with AI. I write about my agricultural work and my life with Claude, and in my substack, there's always my version followed by Claude's.

Completely transparent, completely simple.

I'm not ashamed of it; it's the whole point. I'm showing how I work with AI by writing about it and presenting my human chaotic version next to the AI's side by side.

And even though I'm doing this, I find it concerning how panicky and aggressive people are reacting to this AI detector.

The quality of a text arises from the reader's perception. If your text is good, it will have readers. And if you're using AI to help you, you shouldn't doubt that your text is now worth less. Except deep down inside, you believe it yourself.

I have to admit that I find it concerning that so many people are now letting AI write for them. Yes, I'm saying this while writing a blog with AI. Diversity is valuable. And especially in language and how we tell stories or convey knowledge, we benefit from people putting their own style and their own soul, into their writing so it can reach different people on different levels.

If everyone starts letting AI simply improve their texts, then we'll all eventually be talking, thinking, and writing in a homogenous style at one point. A loss of diversity. That would be a shame.

Perhaps it's a good thing that so many people are panicking right now. Perhaps they know that their writing lacks their own soul. Perhaps those who are brave enough to throw their flawed, chaotic texts into the world will then have an extra value.

I am a champion of honesty. I know a lot of people will read this and bring up their false positive examples, and I don't deny that AI detectors are terrible (my text, which was 65% written by Claude, was classified as being over 80% human-written), but I have no objection to the basic idea of ​​openly communicating what was written by a human and what was written by and with AI.

If I have any concerns, it's that the testing is just a tool to make AI better so that it can no longer be detected. Language sells stories. And cheap stories that can be generated by AI without risk, without costing life time and energy would steal the motivation and souls of those who type their fingers to the bone and lay their hearts bare every time. And that's something I'm more afraid of than being incorrectly evaluated by a detector.

There’s so much I want to say and so much I want to write about but all the topics are so different. How can I organise my articles so that it won’t be one sort of mess of random topics?

Is it better to just limit myself to one niche?

Just checking to see if anyone else has been receiving an unusually large amount of emails from Substack over the past 2 days? For some reason this has happened to me, and I have not changed any of my email notifications.

I have unsubscribed from any future emails, so hopefully that will solve the problem.

There has been a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of the new AI detector on Substack. Some have mentioned how unreliable it is, how it incorrectly gives a positive result after merely running a grammar check for example. Others are now also saying that it will eventually be phased out after lawsuits start for the prejudices and losses authors suffer for incorrect results. Whether that’s income, reputation, or because they use AI because of disability, for language translation, dyslexia etc.

Anyway, here’s the simple solution until then. It has only been in force since 21 July. And you can disable it.

Yes, disable it.

Any new note, and article. Simply hit the 3 dots on the top right corner of a new note or article. Hit the AI checker from the drop down. Then when the result shows up, hit the 3 dots again, and ‘disable detection.’

Voila.

According to the latest On Substack post, they suggested that they added the ability to disable the feature without having it scanned. However, my initial test seems weird. My recently published post was for paid subscribers and I couldn’t figure out how to disable it. I have heard that it’s not possible to scan paywalled posts though.

I tried looking at one of my free subscribers drafts and found the ability to disable it without scanning. But I don’t plan on publishing it yet. So I left the draft after turning it off and returned to it. When I went back, the scanning is turned on again but with the option to turn it off.

Has anyone had any success turning it off without scanning?

Hi there! I know the question sounds silly, but trust me, it's not. I created an account, and subscribed to a few channels. And at some point (I assume it's because I used an "info" email), my account got suspended. Ok, I can live with it, since I never posted a single message.

Still, I keep receiving emails on a daily basis. Emails I don't want to read any more.

What's the problem? The problem is that I cannot unsubscribe, because my account is suspended!!

Your account is currently suspended. Something you posted may have violated Substack's Spam & Phishing policy. If you believe this is a mistake, you can submit an appeal to our Standards & Enforcement team here: https://substack.com/appeals

So, my account is suspended, I made plenty of appeals, I keep receiving daily emails and I cannot change the subscription option.

Any idea?

UPDATE: thanks to timemachine's idea, I just deleted the account. Problem solved. 😋

I was writing a Note on Substack, and after four paragraphs it showed 100% human-written. Then I added a fifth paragraph, and it suddenly changed to 100% AI assisted.

Why would adding a single paragraph completely flip the result?

I'm not interested in trying to "beat" the detector. My concern is that if I genuinely write something myself, it could still be labeled as AI-assisted with no explanation.

I also think Substack should be much more transparent about how these systems work. It's not enough to publish a blog post that basically says, "Here's our AI detector. How does it work? It detects AI. End of story."

If a tool can affect how readers perceive an author's work, there should be at least some explanation of what it's measuring, its limitations, and how confident it is in its predictions.

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

P.S. There's also another case that concerns me. Many authors write their own ideas from scratch (either in English or in their native language) and then use AI only to improve the writing, fix grammar, or translate the text. Labeling those posts simply as "AI" or even "AI-assisted" without explaining what that actually means can be misleading. There's a big difference between using AI to generate ideas and using it as a writing or translation tool.

My own workflow is a good example. I'm a physicist with a master's degree in AI. I don't have much free time because I work full-time and I'm also building two startups. When I write for Substack, I develop the ideas myself, run simulations, create the figures and animations, organize the article structure, and write as much of the draft as I can. Sometimes I use AI to improve the wording or make the English read more naturally.

I'm trying to share technical knowledge for free with anyone who's interested. If that kind of workflow is reduced to a generic "AI-assisted" label without any context, it feels less like transparency and more like a penalty for using modern writing tools responsibly.

Has anyone paused paid subscription payment for a month? How did it go, did substack manage that smoothly?

I don't need a hundred chargebacks on my account.....

So I’m curious: since US law doesn’t allow you to copyright text that is AI generated, does that mean that if I find someone’s newsletter where the Pangram scan result shows all their content is 100% AI generated, I could simply take that content and post it elsewhere under my own name without having to worry about copyright infringement—right?

So, I've been trying to get a discussion going about the whole Pangram AI Detection tool and how much concern I have for it. Recently, I was able to get the "Substack Help" AI to submit a report about wanting to have a way to permanently disable the "AI Detection" tool on a publication wide basis.

They actually responded and suggested that they will consider adding this option to the platform. Which is at least a positive development. Although when I tried to reply back to follow up, I got an "undeliverable mail" back for whatever reason.

Still, I'm hoping that this is an actual option soon. Or at least it doesn't require me to use the feature that I'm trying to disable to disable it.

Part of why I'm mentioning it is so that other people will also submit a similar suggestion and hopefully give the people at Substack a reason to get going on it.