I’ve switched off Substack’s AI detection on my work, a decision I struggled with greatly.
Before computers, we had books. I, like anyone else, would go to those books, get the information and write it down. Then we had typewriters, then computers, then mobile phones we could take notes on, followed by the internet, with the world at our fingertips. Then came spell check, formatting, online tools that gave us suggestions, and predictive text that helped us find a better way of writing things. We now use these every day and don’t blink an eye. And now we have AI, which has given us the ability to do all the things we used to do by hand, all in one place. All of these things made us efficient, but AI is the contentious one.
When you write an email or send a text message, and AI corrects it or helps you finish it off in a better way, would you declare that it wasn’t from you? How often do everyday tasks get a small edit, a spell check or a grammar fix along the way? My work is my message.
Transparency is my work, and that’s what I do. I write about AI, and I use AI to achieve it. On my investigative pieces I’d call it 50/50. The thinking and the patterns are mine, and AI is the efficiency, the research, the legwork and the first drafting from my dictation.
The detector doesn’t see any of that. I tested it over and over again, and the same story would come back 100% human one minute and 100% AI the next. I can’t allow a faulty detector to dictate a false truth about my work.
If my work helps you in some little way, or you enjoy it, that’s all that matters at the end of the day.