8 hours testing Pangram: anti-AI-detection tricks all failed; only self-typed drafts pass

PawelHuryn · x · 2026-08-16

The author spent 8 hours experimenting with Pangram, the AI detector Substack built into its platform. Conclusion: the popular "de-AI-ify" tricks do nothing against detectors — the only thing that passes is typing (or dictating) the first draft yourself.

Key experimental findings

Common advice (kill your em dashes, rewrite in Simplified Technical English) changes style but makes prose read like an IKEA manual — and doesn't fool detectors anyway.
He rewrote one draft three times, swapping punctuation and words: no impact. He polished an AI draft line by line, keeping his own typos: still flagged, 25% human. Even feeding his own collected ideas, takes, and experiment results to AI got flagged.
The only thing that passed: writing the first draft himself. AI could then reword it heavily — still 100% human. Dictation counts too.

Three separate problems

AI slop is defined by readers — they don't run detectors; they feel the texture: buzzword framing ("paradigm shift" five times a post), self-clapping ("Here's the kicker"), artificial enthusiasm, recapping a point two sentences later. Simplified English fixes none of this.
Detection is about who wrote the first draft — the drafter determines the verdict, regardless of later edits.
Watermarking is about which model chose the words — Anthropic will watermark future Claude models via a secret key that influences word choice, invisible to readers and verifiable only by key holders. So his "100% human" AI-reworded draft is exactly what a watermark would catch. The only technique that works everywhere is not using AI at all.

Two closing takes: the loudest AI-slop critics are largely people who built their positions on writing better than others; most readers care far less than expected — what matters is whether you had something to say before opening the agent.

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8 hours testing Pangram: anti-AI-detection tricks all failed; only self-typed drafts pass

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