Thanks for including my piece and for taking a look at these AI checkers! Super important given how widely they’re being promoted. Fwiw, my writing is always “100% human” (as anyone familiar with my POV on the subject will tell you) so the "mixed" result is likely a false positive….which is a pretty good illustration of why I'm skeptical of these tools in the first place 😵💫 Appreciate the mention!
I decided to test it with one of mine(I’m still skeptical and am on the free version) and it came back 100% human, so that is a mark in its favor so far.
People have been outsourcing their thinking and their words for a long time. AI is just a more efficient means of doing so.
Is it particularly sloppy and dishonest in the presentation of one's alleged writing? Of course. But just as AI sources from the "Public" that is reddit and the larger internet, people have been allowing the Public to think and speak for them forever, as Kierkegaard pointed out in detail.
All this is to say that most people were unoriginal parrots even before they had LLMs to do the parroting for them.
Let me clear something up, because being filed next to crypto spam and get-rich-quick slop is a stretch, even for the internet.
I'm a PA-C with a PhD and more than twenty years in clinical medicine, ten of them in an emergency room. Every lab range on my Substack is mine. Every protocol is mine. Every opinion is mine, built from my own training and the years I've spent reading studies most people scroll right past.
Yes, I use AI. Here's the part the detector can't tell you. There's a difference between using AI and training it, and that difference is the whole ballgame.
Using AI is asking the machine what it thinks. It answers with the average of the internet, and the average of the internet is how you get slop. Confident, tidy, and often wrong about your health.
Training it is the opposite. I've fed it my standards, my ranges, the studies I trust, two decades of clinical reasoning, and now it checks my work against me instead of against Google. It flags when a number looks off so I catch it before 10,000 people read it. It tells me when a study doesn't say what I think it says. It cleans my grammar on the way out.
There's a name you already trust for that. Spellcheck. A spellchecker flags "teh" because someone loaded a dictionary into it, and nobody has ever called that cheating. I loaded twenty years of medicine into the tool instead of a dictionary. Same idea, more horsepower.
So no, the machine does not write for me. It helps me answer hundreds of comments from people asking for real help, because there is one of me and thousands of them, and I'd rather reach all of them well than a few of them slowly.
You brought up your grandfather carving birds by hand, and that you treasure them. I get that. I spent eleven years inside the cancer system supporting my daughter, and in that time I built a framework that now helps thousands of women understand their own bodies for the first time. Using a power tool to sand the edges doesn't make the bird less his. The hand and the mind are what make it real, and those are mine.
Here's the irony I keep turning over. You ran my Substack through a tool to decide I lean on tools. The difference is I read my work before I publish it. You didn't read mine before you judged it.
If connection is your goal why have your comment be written by an ai? Thats what it sounds like. If you did write it and want connection with human beings why do you write like an ai?
Be very careful about your accusations and beliefs. You may have a tool that you think is smart, and is giving you the truth, and that this truth is yours to crusade with, but Jordan Dann’s writing is all her own. Her thoughts, her research, her years of professional practice and development. How do I know? Because I watch her week after week painstakingly crafting what she shares with her audience for hours upon hours in her office. I bring her the coffee because she is so engrossed in her writing. I walk the dog so she can spend more time revising. We discuss her ideas on our couch. I see the process. Yes, AI is helpful in grammar and spelling and in other useful ways. But please do not trample on her work in some finger-pointing “Aha!” fashion. It is misguided.
Thanks for including my piece and for taking a look at these AI checkers! Super important given how widely they’re being promoted. Fwiw, my writing is always “100% human” (as anyone familiar with my POV on the subject will tell you) so the "mixed" result is likely a false positive….which is a pretty good illustration of why I'm skeptical of these tools in the first place 😵💫 Appreciate the mention!
I updated it with your response. Thanks.
My pleasure!
I decided to test it with one of mine(I’m still skeptical and am on the free version) and it came back 100% human, so that is a mark in its favor so far.
I'm sure that a lot of content produced is AI generated on Substack.
That being said I'm pretty skeptical of these checkers and their ability to keep pace. It's an arms race I am not sure can be won in the medium term.
People have been outsourcing their thinking and their words for a long time. AI is just a more efficient means of doing so.
Is it particularly sloppy and dishonest in the presentation of one's alleged writing? Of course. But just as AI sources from the "Public" that is reddit and the larger internet, people have been allowing the Public to think and speak for them forever, as Kierkegaard pointed out in detail.
All this is to say that most people were unoriginal parrots even before they had LLMs to do the parroting for them.
Hi, I'm Dagmara. Thanks for the traffic.
Let me clear something up, because being filed next to crypto spam and get-rich-quick slop is a stretch, even for the internet.
I'm a PA-C with a PhD and more than twenty years in clinical medicine, ten of them in an emergency room. Every lab range on my Substack is mine. Every protocol is mine. Every opinion is mine, built from my own training and the years I've spent reading studies most people scroll right past.
Yes, I use AI. Here's the part the detector can't tell you. There's a difference between using AI and training it, and that difference is the whole ballgame.
Using AI is asking the machine what it thinks. It answers with the average of the internet, and the average of the internet is how you get slop. Confident, tidy, and often wrong about your health.
Training it is the opposite. I've fed it my standards, my ranges, the studies I trust, two decades of clinical reasoning, and now it checks my work against me instead of against Google. It flags when a number looks off so I catch it before 10,000 people read it. It tells me when a study doesn't say what I think it says. It cleans my grammar on the way out.
There's a name you already trust for that. Spellcheck. A spellchecker flags "teh" because someone loaded a dictionary into it, and nobody has ever called that cheating. I loaded twenty years of medicine into the tool instead of a dictionary. Same idea, more horsepower.
So no, the machine does not write for me. It helps me answer hundreds of comments from people asking for real help, because there is one of me and thousands of them, and I'd rather reach all of them well than a few of them slowly.
You brought up your grandfather carving birds by hand, and that you treasure them. I get that. I spent eleven years inside the cancer system supporting my daughter, and in that time I built a framework that now helps thousands of women understand their own bodies for the first time. Using a power tool to sand the edges doesn't make the bird less his. The hand and the mind are what make it real, and those are mine.
Here's the irony I keep turning over. You ran my Substack through a tool to decide I lean on tools. The difference is I read my work before I publish it. You didn't read mine before you judged it.
Dagmara
For those at home wondering, this comment was flagged as AI slop, but I doubt you needed me to tell you that.
Your response is LLM.
Sigh… did you even read what I wrote? I home school too. I was trying to actually connect but it doesn’t seem that’s your intention.
If connection is your goal why have your comment be written by an ai? Thats what it sounds like. If you did write it and want connection with human beings why do you write like an ai?
Be very careful about your accusations and beliefs. You may have a tool that you think is smart, and is giving you the truth, and that this truth is yours to crusade with, but Jordan Dann’s writing is all her own. Her thoughts, her research, her years of professional practice and development. How do I know? Because I watch her week after week painstakingly crafting what she shares with her audience for hours upon hours in her office. I bring her the coffee because she is so engrossed in her writing. I walk the dog so she can spend more time revising. We discuss her ideas on our couch. I see the process. Yes, AI is helpful in grammar and spelling and in other useful ways. But please do not trample on her work in some finger-pointing “Aha!” fashion. It is misguided.