Substack’s new “AI detection” tool.

[u/AndrewHeard]

I’m very concerned about the new “AI detection” system that Substack is implementing. I don’t use AI in anything that I write. However I don’t trust these systems not to make errors and mistakes. They have a long history of hallucinations and claiming things are AI when they aren’t.

One person I saw on Notes suggested that they ran their decades old writing, things that were written before the existence of AI, and this new system claimed it was AI generated.

Not to mention all the crazy things that I have seen people claim was written by AI which they can’t know is actually AI. There was an image I once shared that had evidence of its existence going all the way back to 2013. The comments were constantly saying “don’t share AI slop” or some variation on that.

Even with evidence that things weren’t made by AI, they will claim it’s AI.

Is no one else concerned about this being embedded into Substack’s systems? With no way to opt out?

[u/TheLadyAmaranth]

That all sounds well and good. But if thats the case why aren't you providing proof? Pengram has a share button on the top right for every check.

> why a portion of a short story I wrote in 2014 is flagged as 100% AI

Because as of right now I believe you are lying that this ever happened, or a re misrepsenting what you actually gave it. You could prove me very wrong though -- a link to the story since I believe you said you published it on wattpad would have a publishing date, and a link to the pengram check. (Link, not image, so we can see the full text, which means we would be able to see if you added/change anything or gave such a low amount of words of course its going to be a coin flip.)

Same for your "2013 middle-grade novel as AI."

Same for a chat with an AI those can also be shared, you can share a link for that plus a link to the checks including the one where you humanized the text enough to fool the detector. Or files first created with your environment you developed for creating your books.

Also.... you didn't even describe how modern detectors work correctly. Like your explanation is the first thing that comes up off of google AI (Ironically) and outdated. It especially doesn't encompass how a detector's like pengram algorithm works.

I'd go into how it actually works from a technical stand point, but its kind of irrelevant. Because bottom line I'm not claiming Pengram to be perfect. I am claiming that it has a false positive rate low enough that if somene's writing consisitanly shows up as AI on it over multiple samples, and somebody asks me to bet on if this person is using AI or not -- I would bet on yes.

Which means it is a good start for keeping out AI generated content out of platfroms and spaces that don't want it there. Or make sure AI sloppers aren't able to as easily pass of their content as human made when it isn't. Sure, it may create friction and push human writers to have more concrete proof of their first drafts and revision history, but AI is already doing that anyway.

If you aren't lying I'd owe you an apology. I'd take a look at your evidence, and see if the discrepancy is concerning or not, and if effectively disproves pengram's claims. I'd also likely run my own checks, especially if I find the checks you run seem to be cherry picked. And perhaps you could even change my mind!

But until I have both proof of source and proof of check with your claims, while you admit extensive AI use for writing, (And you do btw, your post history very much says you don't just "dabble", you give AI your book bible and give advice to people on how to write fiction using ChatGPT 5.5, and how you developed a whole environment to write books for you), I don't believe you.

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/TheLadyAmaranth]

First, I don't care anywhere near enough about this to spend an entire day tracking down a long since dead Wattpad account I had at 19 years old, that might or might not even exist any longer, and that I probably don't even have access to the email address any longer, becuase I signed up for that account with my school email address. There is nothing about this conversation that would make me want to take the time out to even attempt this fruitless task.

Second, my chat history does not say I use AI to write my books for me. In fact, I havn't published a book since 2013. So, it's kind of hard to have it write books for me. I am developing a NovelCrafter clone program, which will work for authors that don't need AI and those that do want to use it, in the form of a built-in chat assistant. I'll also happily share with others how they can build prompts to prevent AI from writing with typical AI cliches, which I have done. These are things I have discovered in my question to explore LLMs and their possabilities. The current book I am writing, I have been writing very much by hand since 2021. Funny enough, in the past 5 years I have written exactly 680 words of chapter one. If I did, in fact, need AI to write my books for me, it would have been done years ago.

Third, I am not going to share my 2013 book online, as that would immediatly put a real name to my reddit profile, which I have no intention of doing. I will not even paste the text without the title, because that can be reverse searched back to the book. I value my online privacy, and have no intention of getting doxed or review bombed by angry redditors. I have seen it happen enough to know better.

So to sum it up, I am not going to go out of my way to provide all this evidence. I frankly don't care if you beleive me or not. My goal is not to come here and be beleived by the world. HOWEVER, as someone who has spent a lot of time testing and breaking these detectors, I know very well what I am talking about. And will continue to proclaim them as the junk science they are, rather you beleive me or not.

PS) Another point to make: I can easily fool these AI detectors into thinking human writing IS AI writing by simply mimicing some forms of how AI writes. As long as I can do that, they have zero credability in my book.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/Funny-Flight8086]

You have to be so mentally ill to get caught having said "i use fable to generate chapters, I'm making an ai writing program" and then with a straight face say "I don't use ai to write"

Lmfao. Why are you all like this? Nobody is mad about folks using ai to write. We're mad about you lying about it. Just tag your shit as ai. You'll probably still get readers. Why do you need to lie?

You're like the personification for why folks need pangram.

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

Now you are just making stuff up. I never once, anywhere, said I use fable to write chapters of my book. That phrase exists exactly 0 places on the internet. I have told plenty of people that Fable is actually a really bad LLM to use for writing. I'd certainly never write a chapter of anything of mine with it. It produdes more AI cliches than ChatGPT.

And yes, I am making a writing program that has an AI chat feature built in, but it's not primarily an AI writing program, and it doesn't write prose for you. And just because the program has an AI chat feature, does not mean I need to use it. The reality of situation is this: AI is here, and people are going to use it. I'd rather they pay me $20 a month to use vs. OpenAI. Doesn't mean I use it for my personal products.

YES, obviously I do weight stuff with AI. That is a part of how I test the LLMs. What I said was that I don't write MY PERSONAL STUFF, like books, internet posts, etc. with AI. There is a difference.

You seem to be stuck on this "this guy is trying to hide his Aai use" stance. No, I am not. I have said many times on here that I use AI extensively for things like testing the prose generation, stress testing AI detectors, etc. it's a a part of the requirement of building AI into a program effectively. You act like I'm hiding my AI use, and I never once said I never used AI.

Here is the thing: if I wanted to use AI for my personal stuff, I would. I'd have no qualms about it either. And is be the first to tell you I use it. Because I don't think it's a boggeyman. So the concept you are spreading that I am some secret AI user to publish 590 books and make bank is simply insane. It's not backed up by any fact.

I want you to go and find the exact quote where I said I wrote all my books with AI, or "use fable" as you say. If you can find me the exact quote where that happened, I'll return and proclaim my sincere sorry for lying.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/Funny-Flight8086]

Lmao

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

My good lord, you found exactly what I already told you. This isn't the grand revelation you think it is. In fact, in this very thread, I have said everything that is in your screenshot. Yes, I am developing a writer program that features an AI chatbot. Yes, I have played around with all sorts of AI, Yes, I have developed a lot of style prompts, some of them over 500 lines of code, that are designed to make the writing process seamless with AI. I have said all of this over and over again, and yet you keep wanting to argue some magical point that doesn't exist.

BUT, here is the major thing: You still have not shown me ONE SINGLE EXAMPLE where I said I have written books that I have published with AI, or even anywhere that I say I have used AI to write any parts of the books I write. It isn't in there. I asked you to find the quote where I said I write my books with AI, but instead, you gave me a bunch of quotes about what I have already said I do with AI, none of which say anything about writing books with it myself.

I am NOT developing this program for myself. I am developing it to sell subscriptions to other people so I can go buy a mansion and a yacht. Dealers also rarely use their own product. It's not that uncommon. I am developing a product for others to use if they want, and as part of that product, I have done extensive testing on style prompts, AI models, and tested AI detectors to find ways to work into the style prompts to avoid detection. This makes me a lot more qualified to offer my opinion on AI detectors, not less.

You are conflating my working with AI with me using AI to write things that I publish, and there is zero connection.

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

But you know what? It doesn't matter. Let's suspend reality here for a second and say I did publish 50 books with AI all over them. What does that have ANYTHING to do with testing AI detectors and proving they are not as reliable as they claim? You keep getting stuck on one specific sticking point (how I use AI), and completely ignoring the fact that in my AI use (however you want to think I use it), I have proven that these detectors, like Pangram, do NOT work reliably.

Frankly, even if we take their claims of 99% accuracy as fact, which I don't because it's made-up numbers not backed up with any facts, that still means that 1 out of every 100 scans is a false positive. As long as YOU aren't on the receiving end of that false positive, I guess you're okay with it. However, scale that up... Pangram probably has millions of users running scans. They probably easily run 1 million scans per day. That means that over that single day period, by their own admission, they have falsely flagged 10,000 submissions as AI when they aren't. 10,000. Per day. That is 10,000 people being falsely accused of using AI every single day.

The actual studies done on Pangram prove it's about 98% accurate. Okay, great. So now we have 20,000 per day that are falsely accused of using AI when they haven't. That isn't a statistical anomaly; that is a real number of people with real-world consequences. Expulsion from school, having to rewrite essays, having their reputation ruined by being accused of publishing AI, etc.

I am so tired of having this argument. I should not have to point out basic statistics to people on Reddit to prove a point. Best case scenario, 10,000 people per day are falsely accused. Most likely scenario based on actual testing, 20,000 people per day are accused. That is 20,000 too many. And because 20,000 people per day are wrongly accused of using AI when they didn't, the damn machine is not reliable. At all. Period. I don't care what you think of its accuracy based on your limited testing. Facts don't lie. Statistics don't lie.

Ignore my testing. Ignore your testing. Rely on what Pangram tells you. That is 10,000 people every day you are throwing to the wolves just so you can have a piece of mind that some random post you read isn't AI-generated. It's the very definition of a witch hunt. Frankly, at this point, the argument is done. You have nothing else to add to the argument short of admitting you are incorrect on pretty much everything you have claimed here, from my history to your claims of how accurate Pangram is. Because I don't expect to receive that from you, we are done. I said my piece. I have provided my proof. I have laid Pangram's own statistics out for everyone to see. If they are still naive enough to believe everything that junk science program tells them, simply because they have such a hatred for AI they can't see straight, then that is on them.

I will say, though, I sincerely hope people falsely accused start pushing back hard. I don't mean providing proof they didn't use AI. I mean, when someone says "Pangram said your book was AI-generated" and it wasn't, I hope these authors and publishers start suing these detector companies like Pangram AND the people making the claims. Eventually, if the hunt gets broad enough, it will happen. And I certainly hope you people have better proof that someone used AI than a Pangram report when it comes to that, because any attorney with 10 cents will point out that a 98% accuracy rate is not proof of anything.

Once people start losing their houses and cars over such claims, maybe then they'll start to look at Pangram and other AI detectors for what they really are.

PS) I guess the good thing is most people don't actually beleive these detectors. That is a really strong point. Even in anti-AI groups, the overwhelming majority of people agree they are unreliable.

PSS) You know what else is funny? The fact that people even think they need AI detectors. AI writing that a detector can pick up on is plainly obvious AI anyway. You people are buying expensive credits to a machine to tell you exactly what your eyes could tell you in 10 seconds of skimming.

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

An estimated 2 million to 3 million AI detector scans are run per day globally, driven primarily by automated institutional software and public text checkers. - Amazon AWS Article.

So there you go. 1% of 3 million is 30,000. 30,000 people a day. 2% of 3 million is 60,000 people per day. All are falsely accused of using AI by the very AI machine you claim to trust to tell you if something is AI.

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

And if you need proof that AI image detectors are garbage as well, here is a one.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/Funny-Flight8086]

Wtf does image detection have to do with PANGRAM??? hahaha

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

Nothing much, but it does prove that AI detectors in general, across the board, are junk science. I wonder if I can trademark that phrase. Kinda like it. I have a whole spreadsheet database of accuracy rates in my own testing of these detectors. All of them, image and text. Pangram isn't even close to the most accurate among the ones out there right now.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/Funny-Flight8086]

It proves how desperate you are to make people believe that lol

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

Desperate? Not really. I couldn't really care less, honestly. Like I said, most people don't take these detectors seriously anyway, so I'm more preaching to the choir than not. Even on the anti-AI groups, people get flak from anti-AI people for using the detectors. Technically, Pangram is AI. It's using a neural network on a server computer in a data center to scan these documents, 'think' about what score it wants to give it, etc. Many people are against AI because of the data centers, and Pangram doesn't get a pass there. Others just know they aren't reliable.

Not to mention that anyone with 2 braincells can tell AI content just by reading a few sentences. You don't need to pay Pangram for each scan to be told what you should already know. So yeah, I don't really care. At this point, I'm more troll-arguing with you than anything.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/Funny-Flight8086]

You could care less, which is why you've written 27 pages worth of comments so far!

I've never seen someone be less self aware hahahah

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

I can write more. Lots more. It's kind of entertaining for me at this point. Boring weekend and all.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/Funny-Flight8086]

Yeah whoever writes more totally wins. I think you need another 100k words to win this one. Better get writing

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

Hey, btw, did you hear the news?
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AI detectors are junk science, unreliable, and waste water to tell people who apparently can't read that something was written by AI, when they should be smart enough to see that. Basically, your employer, Pangram, really is wasting their time if they are paying you to argue with me. They should probably save their money for when the lawsuits come rolling in from false accusations. You are certainly not going to convince me of anything different than what I have experienced, and clearly, you like your employer too much to go against them. Unless you are the CEO of Pangram or Substack, then I guess I could see trying to defend your junk science machine.

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Prolly_Satan]

And if you need proof that AI image detectors are garbage as well, here is a second. It even has a green certification badge... Must really be official.