Picture this... It’s 1692. You and Maisie from next door don’t like each other much. Maisie sneaks into your garden and pinches your gourds when you’re not looking, and last week, when she suspected you’d spotted her, she called her husband. Yeah, that husband, the one who suspects you might be a witch because he can’t take his eyes off you and you are clearly casting impure thoughts into his head. Well, Maisie called her husband sobbing and declared you are evil because you’d cursed her gourd patch and now they had no gourds for the winter. Maisie can’t burn you herself, but she knows the oldest trick in the village, the one every woman here knows. You don’t destroy a woman yourself; you hand her to the men who will.
“You’re a witch! Burn the witch!”
Wait!
In Scotland, you were innocent until proven guilty, and one of the ways to prove you guilty was to send you to a witch pricker.
The men believed (not Maisie; she doesn’t believe anything; she’s just out to get you) that if you were a witch, then the Devil had sealed his pact with you by leaving a mark somewhere on your body. It was an insensible mark. Meaning, the mark wouldn’t feel pain and wouldn’t bleed. So, if you were guilty, you’d have a numb spot. They’d just have to find it. How did they do that? They stripped you, the accused, publicly shaved off every hair on your still innocent body, and then jabbed a long brass needle called a Bodkin across your skin until something didn’t bleed.
However, the instrument itself was built to lie. Some prickers carried bodkins with hollow handles and retractable shafts. When pricking, the needle looked like it drove a full inch into the flesh, but it slid up into the barrel instead. Not a sound from you (except maybe a giggle if it tickled), and “voila,” you had “The Mark.”
That was the genius of the test. The fraud was invisible because it lived inside the tool.
And follow the money, because it’s the whole story: prickers were paid per witch. A fee for every mark found, every conviction secured. So the instrument that “objectively” detected guilt was wielded by a man whose income depended on detecting it.
What about the ducking stool? If you float, then you must be casting a spell: “Burn the witch!” If you sink... “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”
This post is not about witches.
Listen. Writing is hard. I concede that learning the craft of writing is a long, gorgeous, sometimes painful, soul-healing, frustrating, uniquely human journey. I believe that good writing takes work, sweat, and a shit-ton of tears. I believe in the majesty of a delicious sentence, and I appreciate (and even teach) the ancient art of story structure. I have been writing my entire life and have a Master’s and a Ph.D. in writing, and yet I will still never be a great writer. I’m okay with that because that’s not why I write. And it’s not why most of the world writes either.
We write because writing shares ideas. Writing reaches through the page and grabs someone’s hand who didn’t know they needed your touch. Writing helps every one of us figure out who we are and who we want to be. Writing helps us process this chaos we call life. Writing is expression, and every human has something they want or need to express.
That’s why all the writers here on Substack who are celebrating the introduction of AI detection into what used to be a totally peaceful Scottish Village in 1692 (yeah, just go with the analogy, will ya) are dangerous, because while they are screaming, “writing should be hard!” What they are really saying is, “If writing isn’t hard for you, then you’re a fraud.” And, “even though I can occasionally grow a few spectacular gourds, you have so many beautiful gourds that you must be a witch. And even if you’re not a witch, it’s not fair that people like your gourds, so I’m gonna call you a witch anyway.”
Believe me when I tell you I understand the anger, the fear, and the frustration when someone (or, in this case, something) comes along and takes from you that prize they are not qualified to take. I studied acting for eight years at the highest level of training. It was hard. Learning to act as a craft is like a bundle of emotions personified, reaching down your throat, yanking your insides outside of your body, and stomping all over them. I’m not exaggerating. And yet, I would go to auditions and stand next to a sparkly-eyed, rosy-cheeked 17-year-old who just stepped off the bus from Minnesota after her star turn as Ado Annie, and she would get the part. Oh, how I wished there was a “no training” detector. Ado Annie had no craft, hadn’t practiced, hadn’t had her insides outside her body, but the auditioners enjoyed her work, so who was I to judge?
Who are we to judge?
This post is not about Pangram.
The prickers (or should we call them pricks) weren’t defending the village from witches, really. They were defending their right to judge. The raging writers on Substack right now aren’t defending writing. They are defending their right to judge.
AI slop exists. There is an abundance of essays pumped out by someone who plucked a prompt off the internet and hit publish. Substack and AI will never stop the person who doesn’t care. It only disciplines the person who does. The slop-merchant shrugs and posts, while the real writer starts sanding her voice down to pass the scan. The tool (an AI one, isn’t that ironic) punishes the exact person it claims to protect.
The belief that “I bled, so you must bleed, or it doesn’t count” doesn’t give you, the writer (or me, the actor), the right to judge other people’s effort at expression.
And here’s what this post is really about.
The AI detector is the newest scanner in an old, gendered apparatus. It’s a tool that looks objective, wielded by a corporation that profits from our expression. Just like the Bodkin, it’s engineered so the mark is found because the tool was built to find it. Unfortunately, somehow, the needle always seems to land on whoever was already easiest to burn, the resourceless woman, the person of color, the neurodivergent.
This tool is the gaze that has outlasted any individual casting it upon us, and the gaze’s biggest win is that now we’ve internalized it, and we run it on ourselves.
“Am I really a witch?” (It’s true I can be a bit of a bitch)
“Is my writing any good?” (I did use AI to sort out my thought jumble)
“Am I aging well?” (I think it might be time for that Botox shot)
“Am I good at my job?” (I’d better work this weekend to prove that I’m committed)
Substack just implemented a mechanism to do out loud what women have been made to do their whole lives silently. We check ourselves for authenticity, prove we’re real, worry we’ll be flagged. The detector isn’t a new kind of surveillance. It’s an old one being cheered on by the witches who worry about your easily grown beautiful gourds.
And just like the ducking stool, the game is rigged. Write plainly, you’re flat. Write well, you’re artificial. Age, and you’ve let yourself go; intervene, and you’re fake. There is no safe place to stand, and that is the design, because a standard you could actually meet would end the surveillance, and the surveillance is the entire point. Meet the standard, and you put the self-appointed guard out of a job.
And nobody ever built a detector for the rest of it.
So here’s the truth: your exhaustion doesn’t come from being judged. It comes from the constant submitting to the judging.
Do the one thing that got women hanged in 1692. Refuse to confess. Refuse to name anyone. Step out of the water.
Do you know why I really quit acting? Not because the sparkly-eyed Minnesotan got the part. Because no auditioner was ever going to hand me a certificate that stated, even though I didn’t get the part, I deserved it more.
I’m putting it down now. This essay is me stepping out of the water.
Now stay out of my gourd patch.
Journal Prompt:
Where in your life are you still trying to prove you are authentic? And who is judging you on it?
If you want to do something more with the prompt above, the Quest is waiting in the Quest Library for paid subscribers.
Step Out of the Water — A Quest is a printable Questbook that walks you through one thing in one sitting: finding the places you run the scanner on yourself, and writing your own declaration of refusal. You leave with a page you keep. Not homework. Just fun!
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A while ago, when the AI screaming started, I put one of my messy, sit-at-the-computer-close-my-eyes-and-dump-type pieces through a checker, and it came back as 63% AI. That's when I knew I'd never beat it without diluting myself into nothingness, so I don't try. What the witch prickers don't understand is that AI has been trained on human writing. Ergo, the student takes on the traits of the teacher. So this is like the snake eating its own tail. All AI writing is human based. Just with better discipline. And less heart driving it.
I love the analogy and it made me wonder whether we’re measuring the wrong thing.
If millions of us use AI every day because it helps us think, why wouldn’t someone else’s thinking, refined with AI, also be valuable? I work somewhere where AI is the default, yet I see people creating some of the most inventive things I’ve encountered. The originality doesn’t come from avoiding AI, it comes from the human judgment behind it.
Maybe what we really want isn’t an AI detector, but an originality detector or an authenticity detector. We don’t actually care whether AI was involved. We care whether there was an original human idea, a unique perspective, or genuine judgment.
AI slop isn’t slop because AI wrote it. It’s slop because it uses lots of words to communicate nothing distinctive, nothing observed, nothing from a personal lens.
Perhaps originality isn’t the absence of AI. It’s the presence of human judgment. I wonder if we’re measuring whether something sounds like AI not because it’s the right question, but because it’s the easier one.