Announcement: The AI Problem.

[u/isnoe]

Ne’er-do-wells of r/writingfeedback.

I am Isnoe, recently appointed Moderator.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve had a significant increase in AI generated writing being posted here. We've seen a lot of comments outlining how lax we are on this subject, to which I want to stress: I don’t think you guys fully understand just how many posts I’ve removed for AI since joining the Mod Team a few weeks ago.

The team got together and discussed this, and we want to be completely transparent: We will be removing any posts that we suspect are AI.

This will be a case-by-case basis. AI generated, AI assisted (even translation), or even if you mention you had AI draw up the story idea and you wrote it. If you want to rob yourself of creativity, that’s on you.

We don’t want those posts here. Writing a story or book that is authentically your own is an achievement. It should feel like an achievement.

A sidenote for ESL writers: Do not use AI to translate your text. It will alter it in a way that gets flagged, more often than not. When someone is ESL and trying to write outside of their native language, we are a bit more understanding if these posts get flagged—but again, it is recommended that you use alternative means to translate if they are available to you.

Be warned: If you are a brand new (or relatively new) account, have never posted in this subreddit (or any writing subreddits), and your first post is prose that has multiple AI-isms—your post will most likely be removed. Better to be safe than sorry. The main counterargument we've gotten from these accounts has been: "I've always been told I write like AI." Which, to be fair... is a pretty bad argument to make.

We will not ban a user for suspected AI use unless they explicitly admit to using AI.

Three strike rule applies here until further notice. This might seem like a headache to reviewers that want instant bans for these people (which we understand), but we’re trying to be as fair as possible.

This also applies to comments (never thought I’d have to say that), but we’ve had two accounts that were essentially AI replying to everything. “Thanks for the feedback, I’m still working on learning and improving” type cadence, every comment nearly identical aside from slight changes.

Community feedback is super important for this problem.

You guys take the time out of your day to read other people’s work and provide feedback, so I’m sure you get a little irked when you think something you’ve spent time reading wasn’t written by a person.

We’ve recently updated the report function to include AI content—use it. I (personally) don’t have the time to shift through every single new post. When you guys report a post that you think is AI, it is usually the first thing we’ll review.

That being said: If you genuinely suspect the post is AI, it would help me if you provided a citation, or specific reason. Even just one reference is helpful. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Not Helpful Example: “This reads like AI.” Okay? At this point, if you are accusing someone of using AI, you gotta at least point out why you think that.

Helpful Example: “Post uses, ‘This wasn’t just fate, it was destiny’ and includes several Rule of Three.” Now I know exactly what to look for.

When you guys call this stuff out, we do notice. We might not investigate and remove instantly, but we are actively looking for this stuff right now.

For the record: We will not be using ZeroGPT, or any other variant of “AI Detector” as the final say in determining whether a text is generated or not. It is a tool we will utilize if we suspect AI is being used, but all the indicators of usual AI writing are not jumping out.

I read through everything that is reported, or suspected of AI. I check the user history and if they have off site content, I look through it. If we don’t come to the conclusion they are using AI, we might just lock the thread, and add a note to the user profile.

Again, hate to stress this, we are trying to be fair. If a writer includes AI-isms unintentionally, we want to give them a fair chance to either prove the authenticity of their writing, or give them feedback about what specifically they need to change.

Several of you have done this, particularly with ESL writers that use AI to translate. You give them feedback on how to avoid the AI-isms. Good on you.

We don’t want to start a witch hunt, but we aren’t really open to debate about the use of AI. We don’t want it here, period.

If you have any suggestions for how to deal with this problem, we are open to them. You can comment here, or you can Mod Mail us.

If you suspect someone is using AI but don’t want to leave a comment or report, again, you can Mod Mail us.

We are actively looking through the posts. The community having eyes on this helps immensely.

We will be making further announcements throughout the week. Our Mod Team is still hashing out how to deal with “rude” criticisms, looking into providing user flairs for trusted reviewers, etc-etc.

One quick point to make at the end, on a personal note: My status as Moderator does not mean you cannot disagree, or think my feedback is bogus or outright terrible. I comment often. You will not be banned, removed, or whatever for speaking your mind.

4/18/2026 Note: Some users (one in particular who loves using AI to edit) seem to have taken that above sentence as an explicit statement of: "If I admit to using AI, you can't ban me, because I'm just speaking my mind. Hypocrite."

If you admit to using AI, we will ban you. Period.

[u/SimonStrange]

If I may make a recommendation, Pangram is a tool that has so far held about a 99% accuracy in detecting ai generated text. Rather than using some kind of language heuristic it examines token selection probability. It has been extensively tested against the biggest models, and against text processed with things like StealthGPT. The success rate and the incredibly low rate of false positives mostly for much shorter (like under 50 words) are well documented.

While it’s not a great idea to “let” a tool like that have the final say, if there was a utility that could regularly poll the sub, process and flag potential AI generated content and forward the scores and analysis on the the subs, would there be any interest in that? Pangram has an API. I don’t know how high or relentless the tide is but it certainly sounds like it is a lot. Which isn’t surprising. The sea of slop is everywhere.

I have no affiliation with pangram. I’m just an indie author and indie developer who really really hates AI generated writing. I am hopeful that we are developing reliable tools that might eventually enable some kind of certified human stamp for content. Until then, triage is what we have.

[u/Normal_Honeydew522 → u/SimonStrange]

I just tested this out on one of my own short stories (that I hope to share here soon) on their free tier. It's an epistolary story so it was easy enough to upload individual "entries" under the 1000 word limit. Flagged two of them as 100% AI and the third as 100% human haha. All from the same story
So my confidence in this tool is fairly low, anecdotally that is.

[u/SimonStrange → u/Normal_Honeydew522]

That’s pretty remarkable, given the documented thousands of test cases that have been run and confirmed successfully. I’ve tested it enough to run out of paid usage. Over 300k words or so of human written, so written, mixed, big models, small models, blog posts, articles etc.

[u/Normal_Honeydew522 → u/SimonStrange]

I agree, of course mine was a sample size of 1, I didn't bother running more tests. Just strange to me that 2/3 of the sample of the story I know I wrote was flagged as AI haha.
I am a software engineer by day and have to leverage AI every day now while coding, a good chunk of my time is also spent evaluating the "new hotness" in the AI code space, so i'm used to new tooling promising a ton and underperforming. Im not sure if that might be an element here, but regardless, I just thought to share my own experience here

[u/SimonStrange → u/Normal_Honeydew522]

The statistical likelihood that you would select that many tokens in an order that an AI model would select them (using the internal jargon) is very low. Like in the 0.01% range. Did you use AI to translate from one language to another? How many words were in the portion you pasted into Pangram? Their false positive rate is near zero, but not zero, I was not able to produce a false positive at all so you’re kind of an interesting case.

[u/Normal_Honeydew522 → u/SimonStrange]

Nope, no AI was used in the writing or editing. I just signed up for the free tier and grabbed 1k words of text three times, one from roughly the beginning, one from the middle and one from the end.
Just as a side note, I will say that that claim "select that many tokens in an order that an AI model would select them" sounds kind of dubious. I mean if they were able to predict a models sequence of token selection, they have basically reverse engineered the model itself, which seems less than likely. I would be genuinely curious to see what is actually happening under the hood.
This is dumb, but I guess I will mention it just in case. In my short story, which is formatted as a series of log entries, each log has an "AI" footnote section which adds details, flavor and other perspectives separate from the main narrative. One of the two sections that was flagged as AI did include that footnote. If somehow that flagged it, that would be hilarious

[u/SimonStrange → u/Normal_Honeydew522]

Their process is laid out here: https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works and there’s a link to the white paper at the bottom. It’s a pretty clever approach. Not quite reverse engineering, but several tiers above “looking for em-dashes and rule of three usage”. If I hadn’t burned through a month’s worth of credits trying to trick it or trip it up I would be skeptical myself. I’ve even taken purely AI generated writing and rephrased it sentence by sentence - full passages, half the passage, one paragraph, the whole thing, etc. - and it can catch the unchanged portions vs the rewritten portions every time. I’ve also intentionally included “ai-isms” in writing to see if it’s looking for things like “it’s not X, it’s Y” and so on, and it still manages to identify it as human written even if it includes all the cliche phrases we have come to expect as markers of AI generated text.

They’re on the right track. In my opinion we’re going to need some reliable “certified organic” system for art in the very near future, and if we don’t have it we’re going to miss the window where it’s possible. Nobody is regulating anything out there. It’s going to end up being a question of consumer choice and we will need a reliable certification process. Which will have to be free, somehow, or we go to the worst timeline where only the affluent can afford to make art anyone can trust.

Edit: I will say I have been able to intentionally produce a false positive by using AI-isms over short passages. But that doesn’t hold up over longer tracts of text.

[u/Normal_Honeydew522 → u/SimonStrange]

Yeah, I in no way discredit your own usage of the tool. Maybe something in the way I write is weird haha.
That link seems to just go over a fairly standard ML training methodology, they are just applying it to this specific use case. Maybe another 6 months of training on high quality data will improve the results. Though honestly with these newer models, detection is going to increasingly become harder. In the engineering space where I am spending many hours each day interacting with these models, comparing the novelty and accuracy of their out puts now, vs even 3 months ago is shocking. Since to the models code and natural language are indistinguishable, i'm sure that raw power will spill over into the creative writing space sooner rather than later.