How very human of you, Substack
Substack now wants to tell you how human your writing is. In Italian we would quote Fantozzi: "Com'è umano Lei"
Substack has just launched a new tool, powered by Pangram, that allows readers to scan a post and estimate whether it was written by a human, assisted by AI, or generated entirely by your preferred robot cop, co-pilot or mate.
To be fair, it also allows authors to check their own work before publishing, presumably to avoid the public shaming.
How kind - and very human - of them!!!
The platform can now detect the ‘probable’ presence of a human being inside a paragraph. Detecting the actual human being who wrote it, however, still appears to be beyond the limits of current technology.
I say this after weeks of trying to have a real conversation with an actual human being at Substack about the handling of my database - not theirs: a community built over many years and made up of people I personally brought to the platform.
The emails were written by a chubby Italian human being: me. The questions were entirely human, politely written by a very upset human being: still me. And the problem is unquestionably human.
The answers, when they arrive, are brief, standardised and considerably less conversational than ChatGPT. They are also about as useful as trying to have a meaningful human interaction with a washing machine repurposed as a customer-service agent.
There is something wonderfully modern about a platform investing in technology to determine whether authors are real, while apparently perfecting the art of pretending those same authors do not exist when they turn up at its virtual customer-service desk.
Perhaps Pangram could also be applied to customer support:
Human author detected: 0%
Automated response: 100%
Meaningful engagement: inconclusive
Substack can now measure how much humanity there is in our writing - including, presumably, my personal swearing in Italian, English and possibly Romanian.
It might eventually consider measuring how much humanity there is in the way it treats the people who write on its platform.
In Italian, this title would carry a little more baggage. It echoes Fantozzi - a colossal figure of Italian comedy and part of our cultural DNA - and his immortal “Com’è umano Lei”, reverently addressed to an all-powerful boss who was generally anything but human. Italians will hear the reference immediately. Everyone else will simply hear the sarcasm and perhaps learn something.
Either way, it works.
How very human of you, Substack.