Max Spero, the thirty-year-old cofounder and CEO of Pangram, an AI detection tool, compares his company to the polygraph-like device in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - the machine that tells androids apart from humans. "In a sense, we're detecting whether something is an android or a human," he said.
In June, Substack announced a partnership with Pangram that lets readers scan posts and test whether the writing was produced using generative AI. The deal gives independent writers a way to prove their work is human-made - and gives readers a way to check.
Why Substack signed on
Chris Best, a cofounder of Substack, said the platform had been worried about the spread of low-effort AI content. "When readers have to wonder if what they're reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers - including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in," he wrote in a post announcing the partnership. "Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom."
The introduction came through Jasmine Sun, who writes about AI for The Atlantic and her own Substack. She ran into Best at a Substack event and pushed him to meet Spero. Spero describes his role as "the internet's slop janitor."
"There are cases where AI is used to synthesize massive amounts of data and it's a very useful tool; there are also cases where somebody hasn't bothered to write their newsletters themselves," Spero said. "If you're a newsletter writer who doesn't write, why should I read it?"
How Pangram works
Spero founded Pangram in 2023 with Bradley Emi, now the company's chief technology officer. The tool has gained traction among writers, journalists, and academics. A 2025 study by the University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Institute for Economics found that Pangram "achieves essentially zero false positive rates and false negative rates on medium-length and long passages." Taylor Lorenz, the technology journalist, called it the "best tool on the market" in April.
The Substack partnership is one of several recent moves. This spring, Pangram announced a deal with NewsGuard, which rates outlets' biases, and works with PubShield, a manuscript-scanning platform, and Tremau, a content moderation company. In July, Menlo Ventures provided nine million dollars for Pangram.
Writers looking to understand what generative AI tools can and cannot do might find broader context in Generative AI and LLM courses, which cover the mechanics of how models produce text - and why detection is a hard technical problem.
The pushback
Pangram has detractors. Some argue the tool is inaccurate or dangerous. "Substack's newest subscription model: guilty until proven human," one content creator wrote. "What is Pangram actually for?" asked another. "Hype and witch hunts."
Spero said countering that narrative has been challenging. People think, "Oh, there's been a dozen AI detectors that sucked. Why should we believe yours is good?" he said. Some Substackers have also claimed the tool "consumes a bunch of water" and "vacuums up" their data. He disputes those claims. "It's very easy to make up lies on the internet."
Why this matters for writers
For working writers, the stakes are concrete. Researchers at the University of Maryland used Pangram to analyze 186,000 articles published in 1,500 American newspapers in summer 2025 and found that more than 9 percent contained AI text. The same study detected AI text in the opinion sections of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Spero said he hopes Pangram will help publications codify guidelines around AI use. "Hopefully, we're doing our own small part to keep journalism human."
If you write for a living, the practical takeaway is simple: AI detection is now accurate enough to be used as a standard check, and major platforms are adopting it. That means the choice to use AI on a bylined piece is no longer invisible. Writers who use AI tools thoughtfully should expect to be asked about it - and those who don't use AI might want to know how to prove it. Resources like AI for Writers can help you understand the tools and the rules of this new environment.
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