Substack does not have an official policy governing its use of AI. Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, calls the generative AI boom a major change that writers need to confront, regardless of their personal views on the technology. “Whether you’re for or against this development ultimately doesn’t matter; it’s happening,” he wrote in a post on Substack last year.
Several Substack authors WIRED spoke to emphasized that they use AI to refine their prose, rather than generate entire posts. David Skilling, CEO of a sports agency and owner of the popular soccer newsletter Original Football (over 630,000 subscribers), told WIRED that he believes AI will replace editors. He said he is doing so. “I proudly use modern tools to improve business productivity,” says Skilling. “Although AI detection tools may detect the use of AI, there is a big difference between what is generated by AI and what is generated with AI assistance.”
Subham Panda, one of the writers for Xartup’s Spotlight (more than 668,000 subscribers), which covers news about startups from around the world, says his team uses AI to “curate high-quality content faster. He said that he uses it as a support medium to help him. He emphasized that the newsletter primarily relies on AI to create images and aggregate information, and that writers are responsible for the “details and summaries” included in their posts.
Max Avery, writer of the financial newsletter Strategic Wealth Briefing With Jake Claver (more than 549,000 subscribers), says he uses AI writing software like Hemingway Editor Plus to finalize his drafts. I am. He says the tool “allows us to do more work on the content creation side.”
Financial entrepreneur Josh Belanger similarly uses ChatGPT to streamline the writing process for his newsletter Belanger Trading (which has more than 350,000 subscribers), using Chat for copy editing. He says he relies on the bot Claude. “I write down my thoughts, my research, what I want to include, and I embed it,” he says. Belanger also creates custom GPTs (versions of ChatGPT tailored to specific tasks) to help refine more technical writing that includes specific terminology. This reduces the number of hallucinations caused by chatbots, he says. “There are a lot of nuances to publishing in finance and trading that the AI doesn’t know, so you have to tell it,” he says.
Compared to some of its competitors, Substack appears to have a relatively low amount of AI-generated writes. For example, two other AI discovery companies recently discovered that nearly 40% of the content on blogging platform Medium is generated using artificial intelligence tools. However, the vast majority of suspected AI-generated content on Medium has little engagement or readership, and AI writing on Substack is published by powerful accounts.
