Witch! Witch! Witch!!

Morning Comrades.

It’s turning out to be a week of, “I was going to send out this essay, but instead you are getting this one.

Substack has just installed an AI detection system on here that lets you, everyone, check if the essays, notes, and everything else on offer you are reading are or were rather generated by ChatGPT or whatever else these things are called.

Admittedly, that initially sounded great when I read their email, but truthfully, I don't come across much computer-generated content on here. To be sure, I am no measure in that instance, as I only read a handful of essays by people I enjoy on Substack, and it had never crossed my mind that those essays could have been generated by a chat thing. I also spend as little time as possible here and on the internet in general, so again, my experience isn’t anything to go by. I am sure this site, like all other social media sites, is filled to the brim with “AI” generated content for reasons that mostly still elude me- sure, monetisation but that cannot amount to much, and there aren’t that many boomers left to spam out of money with this nonsense, surely? Also, I don’t even know what this Claude Substack is referring to in their essay, but again, I am happy when the wifi in my home is magically working, and I don’t have to think about the rest. Obviously, I have heard of ChatGPT, mostly because I have seen people use it in real life, which was jarring, but that is a different story entirely.

Coming back to it, people, accounts, using these content-generating tools (and yes, I am fully aware that I sound like a boomer, as my son lovingly calls me) clearly must be a problem on here, but probably not in the way Substack is communicating it. Substack makes their money by taking a percentage from paying subscribers, according to them in any case and there has to be another source of income and since they don’t, seemingly, have the problem of pressure from advertisers as Meta or Twitter has, that being that their advertising is being advertised to bots by bots mostly, I can ony imagine that high profile “writers”, or celebrities rather have potentially put some pressure on them to add this tool. My natural and inherent instinct in regards to any and all celebrities and their motives is usually in direct opposition to what they say, and there isn’t any higher case of morality at play for them; it’s, in most cases, always about their own brand, brand value, and money. With that, the possibility of these people exerting pressure on Substack to “clean this place up” falls short, especially considering the amount of full fledged nazi trash, wellness gurus, and relationship slopsters that fill this space up, and that is not even mentioning the other god-forsaken sites that exist and that these people inhabit. Naturally, this then has to extend to the decision by Substack and their explanation for it, doing so for the greater good and quality of this site, which sounds like a great pitch in a wholly depressing Silicon Valley boardroom filled with ping pong tables and vapid automatons good at LinkedIn but doesn’t cut here.

Truthfully, it’s unclear and, in a way, almost irrelevant why this decision was made, but the consequences are not. I will get to my own initial impressions shortly, but I cannot foresee this tool leading to an improvement in quality writing on here, per se. For God's sake, a polymarket integration exists on this platform and yet, for reasons entirely based on ego, because we essayists tend to be so utterly elitist in our own abhorrent self-belief of superiority, think such a tool, that on a side note, we don’t truly understand how it works, believe it will rid our feeds of slop. It will not. What it will, initially most likely, do is create an atmosphere akin to the original witch hunts: accusations flying across the ether, entirely based on personal dislikes and imaginary moral codes regarding the profession of writing, which have never existed. One of my first jobs was writing for a large London-based music magazine around 1996, and whilst we all professed to the sanctity of journalism, all it usually took was a backstage pass and free cocaine for that to go out the window. Point being, imagining Substack as a sort of Olympus of integrity and quality is juvenile at best; at worst, akin to, worse than that gang in Salem and their Holier Than Thou cult.

None of this is to argue in favour of using ChatGPT or whoever this Claude is to publish stolen work. I have voiced my disdain and dislike for this reality, but the tool in place here, now, isn’t going to solve that issue; burning those companies to the ground would, for now, and even that, in the long run, is debatable. In the long run, one can only suspect that a large portion of the readers and publishers here will simply not care, in the same way that Instagram was utterly destroyed by the Ghoul Zuckerberg, and in the same way that Twitter was ruined by our favourite South African Neo-Nazi with a Phallus problem, Musk.

Personally, it's put me on the back foot. As I am sure you have noticed, today’s essay is different from the ones you are used to, as I am purposely trying to make a point. The original essay that you were supposed to receive today was flagged by the detection system as 100% AI-generated text, and frankly, that not only confused me but also put my hair up. I pre-write these essays mostly on my iPhone Notes app, before, during, and after work, usually with a coffee, wine, and a cigarette in hand. On Sunday, I sit down and sift through all these notes and put them into a coherent essay, try to at least,/ and I use a grammar / spelling program to save you from my atrocious typing skills. It looks like below, for example:

Once that is all done, I put said essays in here and pre-schedule them so that I have enough time and physical capacity to run my own restaurant for the rest of the week. I suspect it is precisely this grammar app that is flagging these texts as AI, but again, who am I to know.

I do not profess to understand how these AI detection programs work, and I genuinely have no interest nor inclination to invest any more time in this nonsense. I only instinctively figured that by the time I would have woken up tomorrow morning, with the intended essay being sent out usually an hour beforehand, there would have been a shit storm brewing, and truthfully, I am not made for those. Some people get off on the internet conflict, and yes, they are part of the culture here, but they are not for me. With that, we have this here today, and I am uncertain as to how I will proceed from here. Writing is and will always be my valve to address and contain my own mental health, and this space has been ideal for that. I do not and will not profess to some nonsensical bourgeois calling of writing for the sake of “moving the masses” (yankee-fied brain-dead video format bullshit) or other such thinly disguised brand-building scam. I write for my own sake to stay sane and satisfy my own curiosity, and I fear this will put an end to it, for the time being. If I have to wake up and answer to a machine that tells me my writing was done by a machine and then deal with the guaranteed shit storm, well, I’d rather just stick to doing it for myself and cooking at work. I’ll leave with an excerpt from the original essay as it is shockingly fitting and the fact that the machine, postbellum, decided that even this rant was written by an AI.

Strange Days, Comrades.

V.

“History’s most enduring lesson is not that repression begins with everyone. It begins with someone, before gradually discovering that there are always more names to add.”

Yours,

Steven