Eighteen signatures
What Substack’s AI detector is for, and who has always been asked to prove it.
I had a reason ready.
Substack rolled out AI detection on July 21. Within hours I’d written a statement about how I make my work: where the tools sit in it, what they carry and what never leaves my hands. Revised it, annoyed AF the whole time, and put it on the masthead. What I hadn’t done was immediately post about it on Substack where people can answer you.
The reason I had ready went like this. Folks don’t think critically. The conversation would turn ugly and it wouldn’t be worth my patience or my energy.
Listen to who that sentence is about.
It’s about them, start to finish. A reason that’s entirely about other people is always doing a job for the person holding it. Mine was protecting a professional. Me, in an industry that already decides which of us gets taken seriously.
I published the statement Friday morning, still annoyed AF.
Any post over a hundred words can now be scanned by a reader who wants to know how much of it a machine wrote. Substack partnered with a company called Pangram. The announcement was titled “Against Claudefishing.” You can run the scan on your own work before you publish, add an explanation of how you make your work and switch it off one post at a time (if you choose).
Note: at the time of writing this, you can now turn off AI detection without scanning your work on posts only (or articles, which is what the dashboard calls them). You can’t turn off AI detection on Notes or comments without scanning them first. I find this unethical AF.
Substack says the quiet part in their own announcement. The scan can estimate whether a machine shaped the text. It can’t measure the care put into it or whether the thinking was yours. And it can’t distinguish a tool that found you a source from a tool that wrote your sentence.
So it measures the one thing it can measure, and we’re supposed to accept it as truth.
The gall.
In October of 1772, eighteen men in Boston put their names to a document about Phillis Wheatley’s poems. The governor of Massachusetts signed it. As did the lieutenant governor Andrew Oliver, and John Hancock. It reads, in part: We whose names are underwritten, do assure the World, that the poems in the following Page, were (as we verily believe,) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl. And then: She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.
That certificate was printed in the front of her book. A reader in 1773 couldn’t read a single line of poetry without first seeing 18 white signatures vouching that she had written it.
Scholars argue now about what that examination really was. Whether she truly sat in a room and answered their questions, or whether her poetry was read and ruled on without her in the room. What really happened isn’t documented. But the certificate exists, signed and bound into the front of her book cuz 18 white men needed to certify that a Black teenager’s words were her own.
Two hundred fifty-three years later. New mechanism, same bullshit.
A detector reads words. It can’t read the conditions the words were made under. A magazine with an editorial assistant, a fact-checker, a copy desk and a research budget produces words. I produce words. I’m one person, running an editorial practice and a publication, taking contract work to keep the lights on and raising three younglings alone. The scan reads us both and returns a number, and that number has no context for who had help and who had to build her own.
That’s the part that gets me. Not the tool. Help has never been distributed evenly in this industry, and it’s never once been called cheating when the right people had it.
So let me be plain about mine. I’m not about to let a percentage speak for me.
Every morning I read a brief I built in Claude. Industry news, news that matters to Black writers, my calendar, important emails, my numbers and the sky. I set every parameter it runs on, and it doesn’t decide what I think about what it brings me. I built it to make sure the right things reach me, cuz I can’t read the entire publishing industry every day and still write, edit, raise my kids and live my life.
I think on the page. When it takes a first pass at assembly, it’s arranging what I already gave it. My ramblings, my early morning brain dumps and my pages that already have shape and teeth cuz writing and editing are my actual trade.
It does the grunt work so I can do the founder’s work. It finds, summarizes and cuz I’ve trained it well on my business, it argues back with me. I treat everything it returns as a source to verify.
What never leaves my hands is my interpretation, my editorial judgment, my argument, the care I put into my work and my voice. Heavy revision is always me. And my clients’ work stays in my hands. I’m a trained editor. I don’t need a machine to assess or line edit a writer’s pages. What I build with these tools are the containers, the report templates and the letters, so delivery is cleaner for me and my client. The work itself is read and felt and edited by me.
The AI detection scan has been turned off for this essay. And will be turned off for every essay going forward until we are given the option to turn it off completely at the account level.
I’m tired of watching Black people’s labor, knowledge and expertise get extracted, and I won’t hand mine to one more system built to score and certify it.
Phillis needed those 18 signatures to get printed. I don’t need anybody’s. That’s my inheritance, and it’s the only part of this I’d call progress.
You don’t owe a machine an account of how you made your work. You don’t owe one to the people who will ask on its behalf either.
May you write like nobody’s grading it, and if you want to be in the inner room where we sit and discuss this together, the Temple is open.
About the author
High Priestess Lakeisha is the founder of The Story Temple, a spiritual writing sanctuary for Black writers healing their relationship with their voice. She is a developmental editor with close to 10 years of experience across fiction and nonfiction, an initiated priestess, a certified evolutionary astrologer, and a shadow work facilitator. Her editorial roots are in fantasy and speculative fiction, the genre space where she first saw the patterns she would later have language for.
Lakeisha’s work holds craft and spirit as one practice. The Elemental Writing Energetics framework reads the manuscript. The Elemental Shadow Wounds framework reads the architect behind the words (the writer). The Story Temple exists on a single premise: writing is a spiritual practice, and a free sentence is a prayer being answered.
Morrison knocked the gaze off the shoulder. Baldwin showed what the eyes could do once it was gone.
Lakeisha, I can always rely on you for some unvarnished truth. Thank you for sharing your candid thoughts on this sticky issue. I’m teaching another Substack workshop today and I wasn’t sure how I’d talk about the AI detection issue. 🙏🏽