Developing RIRA, then ignoring it, wouldn’t be good enough
Being an author on the web always assumed a bundle of things: judgement, ideation, drafting, accountability. Who typed something was a pretty good proxy for who thought it. It no longer is. As with so many business workflows the process of creation is being unbundled, and rebundled. In business writing what used to make sense, no longer does. The accepted wisdom needs a software update. In 2026, there is a better way to write.
The Manifesto Irony
In 2024 I wrote an article, ‘We need to think of LLMs as second brains‘, in which I argued that when we work with AI ‘we should be doing so in ‘cyborg’ mode, where they become part of ‘how we do stuff’. Each of us has this army of virtual interns, who know more about just about everything than we do (save for our own specialities), who we can engage with, to push us, challenge us, and generally enable us to perform at a much higher level than we could on our own.’
If I passed that article through an ‘AI Detector’, such as Pangram, which is now integrated into Substack, it would return ‘100% Human-Written’. If I passed through it an article where I had taken my own advice, and that had been written in ‘cyborg’ mode, it would be flagged as ‘100% AI-Written.’
Which tells us we’ve yet to internalise the implications, or leverage, of the AI age.
The Upfront Confession
As I said, Pangram is now integrated here on Substack, and for any article, or comment, you will see an option to enquire whether AI was involved in it.
With my articles you will mostly see them described as ‘100% AI-Written’. Given my 2024 article this is no surprise, but I want to elaborate on why. And why it is, in 2026, the wrong question to be asking.
What does the detector measure?
I’ve always liked the line often attributed, erroneously, to Ernest Hemingway that one should ‘write drunk, edit sober’, as it captures that feeling of euphoria when one is in the zone and the words, and ideas, and feelings, are flowing like a river after a storm. And those moments of ‘sober’ reflection when you’ve cooled down and, on second thoughts, decided different wording would work better. This is how humans write, with jagged edges. Some lines are better than others, some word constructions more striking than others. All but the very greatest writers ‘can’t keep it up’.
And this is what AI detectors look for - those jagged edges. Or at least, it was how detectors worked. But they found that it just wasn’t very accurate. So everything got more sophisticated still. This is Pangram’s own explanation of what they do.
“Pangram is a type of neural network called a classifier model. In the broadest sense, Pangram reads a segment of writing and – using an enormous set of learned patterns – estimates whether it is AI-generated.
Pangram learns to distinguish human and LLM writing by building a kind of map where authors with similar writing styles are placed close together, while those whose styles differ are positioned farther apart. On this map, Human-Written and AI-generated text form distinct clusters, and our research shows that Pangram can even locate major commercial language models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, in different regions.”
In essence, beyond the obvious AI tells, like ‘It’s X, not Y’, the detectors see patterns we don’t, and they can today be assumed to be very accurate. In answering the incomplete question, in my opinion. As Substack CEO Chris Best refers to in his ‘Against Claudefishing’ article:
“Note that Pangram can only detect whether AI was used to make the text, not whether great human care went into creating it, nor whether AI tools were used as a source.”
The abuses are real
It is fair to say though that ‘AI slop’ absolutely does exist, and should be called out. And it exists in four clear ways:
1. Substitution - when AI is used to simply ‘write an article about XYZ’, lightly edited, and passed off as original thinking. Here the author has offloaded their cognition almost entirely.
2. False intimacy - when the author allows the AI to manufacture anecdotes or experiences and passes them off as their own.
3. Unexamined authority - when the author uses AI to write fluently on topics they have not verified, and could not defend if questioned.
4. Industrialised output - using AI to put out endless content. The sort of thing AI influencers peddle on Linkedin - ‘use this prompt to write 30 days blogposts’.
In any of these cases AI is being used in a diminishing way - it diminishes the author’s cognitive capability and diminishes the reader’s right to not be misled.
The big problem though is non-disclosure. Now Substack is making a thing of this, let’s see who discloses what. You can disable AI-Checking of your posts in this new system, and add a disclosure notice. I won’t be doing the former, and will be doing the latter.
Working, in ‘cyborg’ mode?
It used to take me three to four hours of concentrated work to write a newsletter, in 100% human mode. Today it takes me, in cyborg mode, much the same. The difference now is my newsletters tend to be roughly twice as long, richer in context, and denser in content.
This is how I work today:
Most of the week I am reading and talking to people. Keeping up with ‘Planet AI’ is a full-time job. The fastest growing industry the world has ever seen is working on what it calls ‘the exponential’, and the sheer volume of new features, functionality, research and commentary is extraordinary. I see myself as a filter, taking in the firehose, and dribbling out what is manageable for normal people, with jobs to do, to take in.
So each week I end up with a topic that is front and centre of my mind. Often, as has been the case this year, these fit into the wider frameworks I have been working on, such as RIRA and the CRE Automation Matrix. My core is working out how real estate companies, and real estate itself, is going to change over the next 5-10 years.
Normally on a Friday, or Saturday morning, I will write up a hypothesis for that week’s newsletter. A few paragraphs of quite dense and abbreviated ideas. I will then give this to Claude, on whatever is the current highest quality setting, and ask it to critique, then flesh out these ideas. From there we will go back and forth, often arguing with each other, up and down rabbit holes, for two to three hours. Sometimes in one continuous session, but often over several. Claude can think, and rethink, very fast, but I need to let things mull over in my mind, and this requires a walk, or just a bit of noodling around.
After this time, we start to settle on ‘our position’ - me and my army of intelligences - and I ask Claude to develop a framework for the newsletter, synthesising everything we’ve discussed. And then we argue some more about that.
Then I ask Claude to write the first draft newsletter. Given that our frameworks are fully developed, quite detailed, and full of hopefully notable ideas and turns of phrase, by now this feels more like an assembly session than anything else. We have developed a recipe, refined it, bought all the ingredients, measured them out perfectly - now we just need to do the cooking.
Once a first draft is ready I copy it all, open up whatever the latest version of ChatGPT is, and ask it ‘This is my latest draft newsletter - please rate and review it’.
I then take that review and give it back to Claude and say ‘this is ChatGPT’s rating and review’. And the arguing/debate starts again. Both Claude and I will accept/reject different areas of the review. Once done, we’ll rerun the drafting and give that back, again, to ChatGPT, and repeat the process.
If debate is fractious, and the topic divisive, I will invoke my ‘Virtual Board’, which consists of five deliberately adversarial personas:
The Sceptical Practitioner
A veteran European institutional CRE asset manager/fund director to sanity test everything.
The AI Engineer
A production-focused machine-learning specialist for technical insight.
The Organisational Behaviourist
A workplace learning and change expert who asks ‘What will someone actually do differently on a Tuesday morning six months later?’
The Industry Economist
A specialist in technological disruption and professional services who examines who captures the economic value.
The Structural Contrarian
The final challenger who tests the architecture of the argument.
These are calibrated roles rather than named real-world figures. They are explicitly instructed to watch for my potential true-believer bias, implementation optimism, practitioner gap, confidence about AI capabilities, and assumption that teaching a framework leads to changed behaviour.
I don’t spar with this lot every week - but when ideas need a challenge they are awesome. And pretty mean.
At this stage we are generally done. Hours of debate, iteration, ideation, then considerable editing, by different editors. The button is pushed and a final draft is pumped out. Which incidentally is controlled by a ‘Skill’ I developed - ‘Antony’s Newsletter Voice’ which was trained on thousands of words of my earlier 100% Me-Written blog posts.
Collectively this makes my newsletters amongst the most edited writing, probably, on Substack. In this case though, my editor is my co-producer. This is genuine cyborg work - it is not ‘My ideas, AI typing’.
So who is the author?
In a world where, with extraordinary intelligence at our fingertips we’d be stupid to not use it, who then is the author?
I think five questions have to be answered:
The Accountability Test
Origination: did the central thesis come from me?
Judgement: did I decide what was true, important and worth saying?
Defensibility: could I explain and defend every substantive statement?
Authenticity: does this reflect me, is it representative of my thinking?
Accountability: if it is wrong, is it down to me, not the model?
I have been pushing a distinct worldview ever since I started blogging in 2013. Whether an AI writes the final words or not, I would defy anyone to say this is no longer true. My newsletters are co-produced but I am the author. If they weren’t my ideas, or I did not agree with them, they wouldn’t be in there.
This is unbundling / rebundling in action. The author is the same, but differently expressed.
You’ll have noticed that using AI has saved me no time. And it does not. What it does is allow me to write longer, richer, more highly researched, and better edited newsletters, in the same time span. Without AI, each would take 1-2 days, not 3-4 hours.
A note on economics
From 2013-2024 I wrote on average 20 newsletters a year, of circa 1,000-1,250 words each. In 2025 I wrote 49, totalling 94,046 words, averaging 1,919. This year I write once a week, over 2,000 words. It is up to you whether you agree or not but I think my newsletters this year are richer, deeper and form a more coherent body of work than I’ve ever produced. From an economic perspective, unless in cyborg mode, they simply would not exist. For me this is a 2+2=5 result.
This is business, not literature
My newsletter is for a business audience where what matters are the ideas. Good writing helps to make good ideas more accessible and ‘sticky’, but it is what it is. Business writing. If I was writing my memoirs, or a novel, my attitude would be very different. But I am not - I am writing to hopefully make you think, and to help us all build a better built environment. Doing that with all the tools at my disposal is, for me, the obvious way to go.
RIRA in action
This year I have been writing about, nay evangelising, my RIRA framework. The ‘I’ of which, ‘Imagine’, explicitly argues that we should be taking advantage of the constraints AI removes and looking to do things that were either economically unviable before, or simply not possible. Adding AI into a business should not be, must not be, about doing what was done before, better, faster, cheaper, but imagining what was previously not possible.
For me, in cyborg mode, I have access to nigh on unlimited intelligence, on-demand advisors and mentors, and hyper-persistent editors. As the progenitor of RIRA how could I work any other way, in 2026?
So yes, I will continue writing in this way, and will show up as ‘100% AI-Written’. Which should mean you receive me, but better.
This week, the newsletter is 100% Human-Written, but frankly that tells you precisely nothing about whether the argument is good. Just as last week’s newsletter will return as ‘AI-Written’ and that also tells you nothing.
Which is the whole point. With business writing it is the quality of argument, which someone stands behind, that counts. Not who typed it up. I intend to keep trying to warrant the time it takes to read my content - using all the help I can get.