As most of you probably know, Substack has integrated the AI detector from Pangram. You can check all stories from July 28th onwards or so.

If the author has not disabled it...

And this is where things actually get funny.

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We live in a world that is full of fake and made-up stuff more than ever. So these days it’s quite a bit difficult to find out what is real.

Politicians have been lying all the time. We know that. In some countries, too much lying still has consequences, though. In others, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Good journalism uncovers those lies and points its fingers at them. But this only helps when people actually listen. If they don’t, the liar can go on with his game. And things just get worse, as you can see very clearly these days.

Sometimes journalists get silenced. In autocratic countries, all it takes is a finger snip. In more liberal countries, the game is a little different nowadays. Media is called fake news. Often that’s enough for deflection.

It works because the media got caught here and there spreading false information. Sometimes on purpose, other times by accident or by doing sloppy work. And yes, that should have consequences, too.

The point I want to make here is that we need third-party testing for things that are important to us. Food is an excellent example of that. We want it free of toxins and to be only what’s shown on the ingredients list. Then we can decide whether we want it or not.

Substack offered free third-party testing for articles posted since the end of July. So now we can check whether the text is AI-generated or not. Checking how it’s made, so to speak.

Many people say Pangram is not a reliable detector and that it shows too many false positives. They come up with all sorts of funny stories, such as that Pangram classifies the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.

Bullshit...

Pangram shows 100% human-written as the result.

Do you need to trust me on that? No, you don’t.

Click the following link to see for yourself:

https://www.pangram.com/history/0daa74a9-831e-49fc-8651-70e2b03d03a9?ucc=UiMOED5oP8Q

Everybody could share the links from the results they got. But they rarely do and present screenshots that don't show the whole story…

The next thing is that people make up fragile test cases. They put a short text block inside. Then they demonstrate how Pangram gives a totally different result after only changing a few words.

While this can be reproduced, it actually proves nothing. Changing a few words in a short text is actually not such a small change percentage-wise. Try the same with longer texts, and you will see that it isn’t that easy to totally flip the classification.

But even if that were the case...

Let’s say I could easily turn a fully AI-generated text into something that Pangram 100% recognises as human-written... then of course I would do those few changes.

The thing is that authors can check their Pangram verdict before publishing a story. So if it just needs a bit of polishing to get it all green, why not do it...

Well, well... people say they wanna stay authentic and not change their writing to please the Pangram algo.

Sounds like a legit point at first. But we writers adapt our writing all the time for those bloody algos.

We know pretty well that we need a good headline. Otherwise, people don’t click it, and the algo does not push the distribution. We also know that we need to avoid certain phrases or words because otherwise Gmail might put our article in the promotions or spam folder where only a few people would open it.

We also want to be found by search engines and accordingly make sure that we please them just a little bit.

So... why in hell should we not want our writing to be classified as 100% human-written...?

Why do some writers switch the detector off and come up with funny excuses?

Should we really trust them when they claim all work was done by themselves?

Would you trust a factory that says the smoke coming out of their chimneys is totally safe? Or would you rather have a look at an independent third-party test?

I am not against using AI. Sometimes we just like fast food, extra creamy chocolate, or whatnot…

I just find it very weird when people deactivate an independent test that you could do with a simple copy and paste anyway. Everyone can sign up for Pangram and have 4 free checks per day, or any other of the better detectors.

But as much as I don’t trust politicians easily, I don’t trust writers who claim they don’t use AI and at the same time deactivate the integrated Pangram test. I also don’t buy into their stories that those detectors don’t work.

I have done my own testing and find them pretty neat.

Long story short, I want to encourage you to use Pangram and other AI detectors to get an idea of what is going on out there.

The more these tests are being used, the higher the entry barriers for all those people who just wanna try their luck. Or, in other words, people being a bit more critical about what they consume could help to reduce the flood wave a bit.

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Wow, butterflies remember us from their caterpillar stage — what a heartwarming story. Like we matter to tiny insects. Just treat them well, and they come back to you as beautiful butterflies.

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And then I noticed that I read the text with my heart and not with my mind.

It didn’t say that the butterflies remember him. And later on in my research, I also found out that the memory thingy is not exactly true.

My story could have ended here like it’s often the case with many of these clickbaity things. But there was actually something valuable in what the Japanese boy discovered.

What did actually happen?

The 10-year-old Jo Nagai raised swallowtail butterflies at his home in Kobe, Japan. He noticed that the butterflies he cared deeply about when they were caterpillars didn’t fly right away when he released them. They stayed with him for a bit until they eventually moved on.

He then set up an experiment to test whether the memory of caterpillars stays intact even after metamorphosis. For this, he released some lavender scent right before giving them a mild vibrational stimulation. Well, actually it wasn’t that mild, as the caterpillar had to vomit from that. But hey, they survived it.

Later, when they were butterflies, he released lavender scent again, and the insects directly avoided it. He tried the same with the 2nd generation of those initially stimulated insects. The young ones also avoided the lavender scent without ever being stimulated.

What does this show?

Somehow the tendency to avoid lavender was passed to the next generation. The experiment does not show whether actual memories were passed.

Still, it’s incredible to see how learned responses are passed from one to next generation.

There are similar experiments with mice which showed the same.

I don’t know about us humans. Maybe we have that too. And if that’s the case, maybe we still avoid things that are no longer harmful to us.

For me, that’s something to ponder.

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Every few decades, we humans like to scare ourselves. Not just a little, but like in a real horror movie.

No, I am not talking about wars.

I talk about things that often improve the quality of our lives. But before we finally accept and learn to live with them, many of us join the collective fear cycle and try to make it even bigger.

What I am talking about is the advent of a new technology.

I remember when, in the eighties, robots became good enough to be used in mass production. People were scared that they might lose their jobs. You couldn’t escape that topic in the media, and even if you tried, one of those dystopian movies would eventually get you.

No escape unless you lived under a rock...

People made Mr. Robot their main discussion topic. Everybody had an idea how doomed we might be in the future. Of course, there were also some optimists. But apart from a few exceptions, nobody could really see what would be coming.

At one point we forgot about the hysteria as if it never happened. Peaceful times. Until the collective fear struck us again; currently it’s all about AI, and we might soon come to a point where the fear cloud loses a bit of its steam.

What I noticed is that the underlying patterns when new technologies arrive are somewhat similar.

1. A few nerds play with a new technology, and things get traction

2. The new technology gets hyped up with its benefits in focus

3. As people get aware of the downside, fear starts to arise

4. The fear gets amplified and can reach panic levels

5. Depending on the impact of the technology, the Zeitgeist changes

6. A sobering set in once there is more clarity in what the new technology actually can do

7. People get used to and adapt to the new technology and forget about their fears

8. Life goes back to normal for maybe a decade or two

And the funny thing is that most of us don’t see this cycle only for what it is. Only when we are old enough and have gone through the seasons several dozen times do we begin to see the cycle for what it is.

In the 19th century it was “Railway Madness”, in the 1920s the advent of the radio, then the internet, the CERN Large Hadron Collider potentially creating a black hole that would swallow us all, and lately AI.

Maybe it all started with Gutenberg, the wheel, the fire, or using urea to bleach your clothes.

Who knows...

But before this article is over, I eventually want to come to the point I wanted to make.

Collective fear is easy to spot when you are not a part of the crowd. From the outside, things look wild and maybe a bit crazy, or let’s call it irrational. Sounds a bit softer and probably politically more correct.

And now imagine an outsider looking at you?

What self-created fears might they see in you?

How do you create your own suffering and even fuel it further?

And finally, what will you need to get out of that self-created cycle?

That’s it for today...

Before You Go…

This article is the first in my new section, Short Reads.

I created it to publish whenever I feel like writing without spamming your inbox. Meaning, there will be no notification for new stories in this section.

So you can either bookmark the above link and come here from time to time. Or you subscribe to Reflections where I will include updates of the most popular or meaningful short reads.

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