Blocked and Reported · Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal

Episode 302: It's Not Cheating. It's Leveraging Available Tools To Optimize Your Workflow.

April 6, 2026·1 hr 6 min·5 clips

A New York Times Modern Love column about losing custody of a son was flagged as partly ChatGPT-written.

The opening starts sideways. A quick bit about Lindy West, Aham, and a movie called Thin Skin becomes exactly the kind of digressive throat-clearing this show enjoys. Then the AI fight shows up. Audrey Henson, who goes by Dre Dossier, challenged Pangram after its CEO posted a report tied to scanned text from Mia Ballard's book. One objection is practical: Henson says the copy scanned came from a pirating website. The hosts find that weird, but not automatically fatal unless the text itself was different. They want receipts. The argument turns on whether AI detectors are too shaky for a career-ending accusation, especially when false positives come with the territory. One host tests Pangram. In four informal trials, it gets the AI text and the host's own writing right. The joke writes itself: human prose may be less about elegance than about typos no machine would choose on purpose. Henson widens the frame, arguing that tools with demonstrated racial and linguistic bias deserve more scrutiny when used against a Black woman in an industry with equity problems. The hosts do not buy that move. Their skepticism is blunt. Then the speculation gets stranger, with the hosts imagining the wildest possible twist: Ballard's identity itself being part of the deception. The ending drifts back to podcast business. They pitch subscriptions, joke about being real people instead of AI, and admit the show-note art already uses AI. Even the outro stays on theme. The episode treats AI-detector arguments, evidence fights, and online identity suspicion as one messy discourse pile, not a tidy morality play.

As heard by us

A sharp, skeptical pass through AI-detection claims, bias arguments, and the politics of proving who wrote what.

Blocked and Reported takes an AI-detection fight and treats it less as a settled scandal than as a test of how quickly online arguments harden around shaky evidence.

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Why you'd press play

A sideways, funny conversation about AI detection, false positives, and how the wrong scan can do real damage.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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