Substack does not have an official policy governing the use of AI. One of the co-founders of Substack, Hamish McKenzie, has described the rise of generative AI as a radical change that writers will have to confront, regardless of their personal views on the technology: “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether you are for or against this development. It’s happening,” he wrote in a Substack post last year.
Several of the Substack authors WIRED spoke to emphasized that they used AI to polish their prose rather than generating entire posts. David Skilling, CEO of a sports agency that runs the popular football newsletter Original Football (more than 630,000 subscribers), told WIRED that he sees AI as a substitute publisher. “I proudly use modern productivity tools in my businesses,” says Skilling. “AI detection tools can detect AI usage, but there is a big difference between AI-generated and AI-assisted ones.”
Subham Panda, one of Xartup’s Spotlight writers (over 668,000 subscribers), which covers startup news around the world, said his team uses AI as an “assistive means to help us curate high-quality content.” faster.” He highlighted that the newsletter relies mainly on artificial intelligence to create images and add information and that the editors are responsible for the “details and summaries” contained in their publications.
Max Avery, editor of the financial newsletter Strategic Wealth Briefing With Jake Claver (549,000+ subscribers), says he uses AI writing software like Hemingway Editor Plus to polish his drafts. He says the tools help him “work harder on the content creation front.”
Financial entrepreneur Josh Belanger says he similarly uses ChatGPT to streamline the writing process for his newsletter, Belanger Trading (350,000+ subscribers), and relies on chatbot Claude to help him edit. “I’ll write down my thoughts, research, things I want to include and connect it,” he says. Belanger also creates custom GPTs (versions of ChatGPT designed for specific tasks) to help polish more technical writing that includes specific jargon, which he says reduces the amount of hallucinations the chatbot produces. “To publish in finance or commerce, there are a lot of nuances… The AI is not going to know, so I need to prompt it,” he says.
Compared to some of its competitors, Substack appears to have a relatively low amount of AI-generated writing. For example, two other AI detection companies recently discovered that about 40 percent of the content on the blogging platform Medium was generated using artificial intelligence tools. But much of the suspicious AI-generated content on Medium had little engagement or readership, while AI writing on Substack is published by powerful accounts.