So Substack built a lie detector for prose.
July 21. They partnered with an outfit called Pangram, which sounds like a diet cracker but is actually a machine that reads your writing and decides whether a person made it. You can scan a post. You can scan a comment. Anything over a hundred words gets the treatment.
And they gave the crime a name. The announcement is literally titled Against Claudefishing.
Claudefishing.
Claudefishing! Come on. That’s beautiful. That sounds like something you do off a dock in Ottawa with a cooler of Molson and a guy named Denny.
The Card
Substack also gives you a little disclosure card now. “How I make this.” Voluntary. A place to come clean before the machine does it for you.
Mine says AI.
It stands for Allen Iverson.
Karie asked me why I did that.
“Because it’s true,” I said.
“It is not true.”
“Ma’am, it is the truest thing on the whole website.”
She went back to her book. (She does this. It’s how I know a bit is working.)
Practice
Here’s the thing about Iverson. 2002. Press conference. Man wins an MVP and the room wants to discuss his ATTENDANCE. And he stands there and takes a perfectly reasonable question about showing up to a gym and turns it into a philosophy.
That’s my whole operation.
I don’t practice. I don’t outline. I don’t do the thing where you fill a notebook with observations and let them marinate. I sit down at 5:40 in the morning with a cup of coffee that’s mostly a threat and I WRITE.
Game day. Every day. Fifty-two footers a year and a couple of dunks.
So when Pangram scans me and the needle jumps, I don’t take it as an accusation. I take it as a compliment about my consistency. Nobody’s this reliable by accident. Nobody puts up these numbers on effort alone.
We talking about writing, man. Not practice. Writing.
The One in Ten Thousand
Pangram’s CEO says the false positive rate is about one in ten thousand. Other writers are less charmed. 404 Media went out and collected them, and the piece is called Substackers Say New AI Detection Tool Is a ‘Witch Hunt’, which tells you where the temperature is.
One in ten thousand!
That sounds great until you remember how many posts go up on that platform every single day. Somewhere out there, right now, a retired dental hygienist in Sandusky is writing about her tomatoes and getting branded a machine. She’s got a trellis. She’s got a lifetime of opinions about blossom end rot. And a probability engine has decided she’s a Roomba with feelings.
Nobody’s coming to save her, either. You can’t prove a negative. What’s she supposed to do, mail them her hands?
Field Testing
I got curious. So I started scanning things.
Scanned my grocery list. Scanned a text I sent Karie in 2019 that just said “ok but the raccoon is BACK.” Scanned the feed store receipt for Trouble McFussbucket, who is up to 161 pounds now and blames the clover, which is a lie, because I have seen what she does to the apples that blow down off our trees. All of them. In one afternoon.
Scanned my 1994 stand-up set. Boston. Catch a Rising Star, over in Cambridge, back when the drink minimum did most of the heavy lifting. The bit where I learn Japanese to win over a Japanese woman.
Which I did. Cassette tapes. In a car with no air conditioning, windows down on Storrow Drive in August, dead stopped, repeating a stranger’s voice back at the Charles River while a man in a Corolla watched me do it.
And the phrase I came away with, the one I had COLD, the one I could produce under pressure, was this.
私のアメリカ車の部品はありますか
Do you have parts for my American car?
That’s what I brought to the table. Weeks of tapes and a sunburned left arm, and what I could offer the woman I loved was a question about a fuel pump.
There was a woman in the front row that night. Short dress. Feet up on the edge of the stage. No underwear.
She wasn’t Japanese.
So I had nothing for her. Nothing! I had ONE phrase, dear reader, and it was about a fuel pump, and it did not apply. She could have been the great love of my life and I’d have stood up there like a language cassette with a haircut.
I did my seven minutes and looked at the door.
Wait. What if the scan comes back clean? What if a machine reads that and says yep, human, definitely a guy, and now I’m CERTIFIED for it? Notarized?
I think that might be worse.
The Part Where I’m Not Innocent
Okay. Honest.
I do use the other AI. The one with the polite little cursor. I use it the way a guy with a bad back uses a hand truck. It doesn’t decide what goes on the truck. It doesn’t know what the truck is FOR. But it will hold the far end of a couch at eleven at night without complaining, and that’s more than I can say for most of my friends.
Does that make me a Claudefisher? Probably. Dear reader, I have been fishing.
But here’s what nobody in this argument wants to say out loud. The scanner isn’t measuring whether a person wrote it. It’s measuring whether it SOUNDS like a person wrote it. Those are different jobs. One of them is detection. The other one is taste.
And taste has never once been improved by a percentage.
Verdict
I was going to end this by running the whole essay through the thing. Big finish. Show you the number.
Then I thought about it for a while and decided I don’t want to know.
So it’s staying up unscanned, with a card at the bottom that says AI, and if anybody asks I’ll tell them the truth. Allen Iverson wrote it. He was great. He’s still great.
He just doesn’t practice.
Anyway. The pig’s out again.
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.
He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.
See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.
Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving Spetember 1st!) and “Elliot Nessie.”
He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.
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